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.”