Gwynetta Gittens

The Lee County School Board approved the total project cost estimate for Lehigh Acres Middle School expansion, as well as Amanecer Elementary School in the amount of $32,136,370 through Certificates of Participation financing.

Board Member Gwyn Gittens asked questions about how the schools are being paid for during a meeting last week, as she was told the district could use the half cent penny sales tax money.

Budget Director Kelly Letcher said there is new legislation which requires the district to build within a certain cost per student station, which includes additions.

“We are unable with the prices of building and doing additions to stay with that cost per student station,” she said. “If you cannot, then you must do a COPS. It is your only way of getting the jobs done. We will do a COPS when we do the Elementary J. We will also do the middle School MM addition, along with a couple of other schools. We will throw them all together to get the best bang for the buck. We will be repaying that with sales tax dollars and others because sales tax is so limited now with the tight timing. We are spreading that debt out now longer, so we are not putting all of that debt in the sales tax end of that sales tax time frame.”

Letcher said the timing of the new statute happened exactly at the same time the district had the half penny sales tax passed.

“We were truly trying to pay as we go. Our very first school whammed us right away. That took that whole ability away from us the minute we got our sales tax,” she said.

Gittens said the district should have been extremely transparent with the community.

“I don’t know how it was communicated, but it is not understood in a lot of the community. We got the sales tax and then the law got changed. That needs to be cleared,” she said.

Gittens asked that signs be placed at the schools explaining what “your tax dollars at work” means. She wants it to be clarified exactly how much of their sales tax dollars are being put into the schools.

Amanecer Elementary School has a total project cost of $24,222.284, which includes $2,431,533 of design services; $21,366,092 of construction costs and $419,658.40 of ancillary costs.

The Lehigh Acres Middle School addition has a total project cost of $9,914,086, which includes $417,625 for design services; $5,780,455 for construction costs and $211,005.60 for ancillary costs.

The shell package of both is $32,136,370, which will include design services, total construction costs, ancillary cost, offsite development costs, furniture, fixtures, equipment and technology.

According to the district the “additional funding is for unforeseen conditions and code related updating.”