Trustees with the Rainbow District School Board voted at their Feb. 21 meeting to declare the board's main office on Young Street “surplus to the needs” of the board.
The school board plans to sell the downtown Sudbury property and use the proceeds to fund, at least in part, its new $7.3-million Centre for Education, to be located at the former Wembley Public School site.
Board staff will start moving into Wembley this summer.
Now that the main board office has been declared “surplus,” there's a specific process that needs to be followed for its sale, said Rainbow board director of education Norm Blaseg.
“It immediately triggers a 180-day mechanism by which we offer it to various other municipal and/or provincial entities,” he said. “When I say it's offered to them, they still have to pay market value.”
If other school boards or any of the three levels of government aren't interested, the property can be sold to the private sector.
When asked how much the school board wants for the property, Blaseg would only say “as much as possible.”
The board's plans to spend millions on a new Centre for Education was targeted by angry parents during Rainbow's recent accommodation review, in which trustees ultimately decided to close eight schools.
Blaseg said the board is centralizing support services such as IT, maintenance and educational support at Wembley that are currently spread out over several buildings.
Some of these employees currently work out of Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School, but the space they occupy is now needed for Grade 7 and 8 students.
The Centre for Education will also house the Restart Program, currently at Barrydowne College, and the program for Children and Youth in Care, currently at O’Connor Park.
Blaseg told Sudbury.com in 2015 the downtown Sudbury board office has a lack of parking and would require significant upgrades, including to its heating and ventilation system.
Given the renewal costs, “it was just more cost-effective” to move into a building that better met the board's needs, and one it already owns, he said.
“There's always going to be detractors, no matter what you do, right?” he said.
“People will look at it from different perspectives. But the reality is, we're trying to minimize the space that's out there, we're trying to centralize our services and we're trying to bring down our operating costs. That's what drives this.”
