COUNTY’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS RESOLVING GROWTH CHALLENGES

By David Sikes, P.E. Senior Engineer, MACTEC, Inc.

Growth Challenges

For the past five years, Gwinnett County has been one of the fastest growing counties in Georgia and the nation, which has resulted in an influx of new students. With a budget of $1.3 billion for the fiscal year 2005, Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) is the largest school system in Georgia. The system’s 63 elementary, 20 middle, 16 high schools, and seven other educational facilities enroll an additional 6,000 students a year. The projected enrollment for 2004-2005 is 135,568. By 2008-2009, it is expected to be about 157,700. Growth brings major challenges… increase in student enrollment calls for additional classroom space and teachers. These challenges were well met in 2004-05 as GCPS added 10 new schools and more than 1,200 new teachers for the 2004-2005-school term.

Five-Year Building Program

Even though GCPS expects to make significant inroads toward handling soaring student enrollment with its current five-year building program (2002-07), according to a GCPS spokesperson, the program will only meet about 75 percent of the classroom needs. While the building program will provide muchneeded classroom space (approximately 2,000 classrooms by 2007), financing the building program and finding land for future school sites will be challenging.

Construction Funding and Site Selection Challenges

School construction is funded primarily with sales tax proceeds and state funding. With state budget dollars being limited, GCPS will have to ask voters to extend the county’s current one-cent sales tax for schools in 2006. In addition, GCPS says finding willing sellers with sufficient acreage to build a school is not easy. Due to extraordinary development in parts of the county, GCPS may not be as successful as in the past in buying large tracts of land with few houses.

Primarily funded by the 2002 Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST), the current building program is expected to raise $995 million over a five-year period. However, sales tax proceeds are coming in at approximately 71 percent of projections. In an effort to keep the building program on track that voters approved in November 2001, the Gwinnett County Board of Education has employed another innovative financing mechanism-- a lease/purchase agreement with the Gwinnett Development Authority (GDA). The lease/purchase will allow GCPS to borrow money at low interest rates, continue its building program, and lessen the gap between rising student enrollment and classroom needs. GCPS officials said the lease/purchase agreement allows them to purchase sites now while land is affordable, thus having land available for the 30+ new schools that will be sorely needed in its 2007-12 building program. MACTEC is helping GCPS evaluate potential school sites by performing geotechnical explorations and Phase I environmental and risk hazard assessments. Remaining projects from GCPS’ 2002-2007 building program will be funded by a combination of funds acquired through the lease/purchase plan, sales tax revenues, and state funds.

GCPS is implementing a number of proactive steps to meet these serious growth challenges. “With proper funding,” says Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks, “GCPS can focus resources on our most important priority – teaching and learning.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: David Sikes is Office Manager and Senior Engineer in the Lawrenceville office of MACTEC Engineering and Consulting, Inc. (www.mactec.com). MACTEC is a $436 million environmental, engineering and construction services firm with 3,000 employees in over 100 offices nationwide.