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WILKES-BARRE — The good news, if you could call it that, is that Wilkes-Barre Area School District’s massive looming high school construction project could be eligible for state reimbursement even if a moratorium on such state spending is reinstated this summer.
The bad news: The School Board would have to decide what project, exactly, it wants to do and submit detailed paperwork to the state by the end of June, and even then there’s no guarantee the reimbursement would materialize.
That was the dilemma Board Vice President Joe Caffrey said a state Department of Education official presented last Friday during a lengthy phone conference. And considering the reimbursement could be up to 20 percent of total cost estimated as high as $235 million, it’s a potentially costly decision.
Board members have expressed determination to deal with the district’s three aging high schools, dubbed “functionally obsolete” in a feasibility study that presented multiple options that involved building one small school and renovating others, building two small schools, or building a large single school while renovating an existing one. Within those plans, there are variations regarding how many students and grades would be served in each building.
The problem, Caffrey said, is that despite considerable largesse towards public education in Gov. Tom Wolf’s proposed budget, Wolf has also proposed reinstating a moratorium on the state’s “Plan Con” system used to reimburse districts for construction and renovation costs. Caffrey said a state official told him and other district officials during the conference call that if the district had any hope of getting state construction money, the board would have to file “Plan Con Part A,” the first of numerous paperwork filings in the system, by July 1, the date the moratorium would be reinstated.
Plan Con was put on ice by Wolf’s Predecessor Tom Corbett and only recently restored. And while Caffrey said he was told there is no guarantee any money would be forthcoming even if the board filed Plan Con A by July 1, he was also told there would be no chance at all of future reimbursement if it wasn’t filed by that deadline.
“It was sort of a bombshell,” Superintendent Bernard Prevuznak said.
Solicitor Ray Wendolowski said Plan Con A requires specific information of how many students would be attending which schools under what grade configurations. A decision would have to be made some time in May in order to prepare Plan Con A papers by the end of June, Wendolowski said.
The board is nowhere near such a decision. Caffrey, who is heading the board committee steering the proposed construction, said he had “optimistically” hoped to have the matter up for consideration by mid July. The board appointed two committees of residents and district staff to study options and make recommendations.
The board made no decision Monday, and in the end Caffrey framed it as a matter of this board’s legacy, asking: “Would this board want to be the board to decide to walk away” from what could be tens of millions of dollars?