As first reported on October 12 on connectmidmissouri.com, the Columbia School Board was planning to meet on Tuesday evening to complete various property deals. Specifically, district officials are interested in buying a vacant building on Paris Road and selling a storage facility on Van Horn Tavern Road.
Administrators said these commercial real estate transactions would consolidate much of the school’s resources, which are currently scattered throughout the city.
With the purchase of the vacant building, Columbia school officials hope to consolidate most of their services into one headquarters; additionally, they claim that the district's current storage is too small for Columbia's growing school district. School officials plan to use the money from selling the old storage facility to help pay for the larger building on Paris Road, which is said to have three times the space for the district's building services department and nutrition services programs.
"There is an ‘abundance’ of food services equipment: extra refrigerators, coolers, freezers -those sorts of things,” School Board President Jan Mees stated. “Of course, all of the paper supplies of the district go there to be distributed out (to the individual schools.). At any given time, you might have thousands of boxes of paper to be distributed at a later time.”
Several discussions have been held with the Potterfield Group, owners of the Paris Road facility (which has 60,000+ square-feet of space.) “They have expressed interest in purchasing our property (on Van Horn Tavern Road) and then allowing us to purchase a property that they own on Paris Road. On Tuesday evening, the Board will consider allowing the school district to declare the Van Horn Tavern building a ‘surplus property’, enabling us to then sell that property to the Potterfield Group," said Columbia Public Schools spokesperson, Michelle Baumstark.
The sale of the district's old building would cover the cost of the new building on Paris Road, which is valued at more than one million dollars.
The board also planned to discuss changes in curriculum at this session.