Georgia Brown elementary to remain at its campus after school board pauses remodel 

The whiplash continues for Georgia Brown Elementary School in Paso Robles.

As teachers and staff packed up their classrooms and offices to prepare for a move to a temporary campus this summer, unforeseen circumstances are forcing a last-minute change of plans. An "anomalous feature" found 30 feet below the 36th Street campus—a potential earthquake fault line—is bringing a planned remodel of the 80-year-old school to a halt.

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• Map Courtesy Of Paso Robles Joint Unified School District
• FAULT LINE? Soil anomalies found under Georgia Brown Elementary School in Paso Robles (red lines) are causing the school district to pause its planned remodel of the campus.

The Paso school district board of trustees voted 6-1 on May 23 to pause all development activities and instead keep Georgia Brown on its 36th Street campus for the next school year—buying it time to evaluate the right path forward.

"This is heavy news," said Sondra Williams, Area 4 trustee for the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District (PRJUSD). "I just want to hold a little bit of space for the gravity of this news in a part of town and population that is sometimes largely underserved and under-heard."

The geological feature found below the Georgia Brown campus will require further investigation to determine exactly what it is. The district has reassured the school community that the campus remains safe.

While PRJUSD officials did not have an estimate on May 23 of how much that investigative work would cost, they warned it will be expensive. It'll require a contractor to dig a roughly 30-foot-by-150-foot trench in the middle of the campus.

The Division of the State Architect (DSA), which oversees construction projects in California's public schools, is requiring the school district to complete that work before moving forward with any construction.

That, to Area 2 Trustee Joel Peterson, was "highly frustrating." Peterson cast the lone dissent vote to pause the project.

"It makes no sense. This is the kind of stuff you get from DSA that makes people so frustrated with government. I think it's ridiculous," Peterson said. "They understand we're retrofitting an 80-year-old [campus], that's one story, that withstood a 6.5 [magnitude] earthquake 20 years ago, across from where they're building multi-million-dollar houses, apartments, a brand-new Boys and Girls Club, within a quarter mile of this place?

"I'm not going to stop my quest to have that school rebuilt and remodeled on that end of town, flat out."

Most board trustees agreed that getting a cost estimate for the investigative work would be critical to making a decision about the future of Georgia Brown. A special board meeting will be scheduled this summer to discuss the costs and options.

Trustee Kenney Enney said that if the investigative work is in the range of "millions of dollars," the district may be forced to let go of the Georgia Brown campus.

"If it gets that high, we're going to have to decide at that point, the only option is you're going to have to pretty much abandon the site," Enney said.

As the school board debated the options, it considered delaying any decisions until the cost estimate came back. But Georgia Brown Principal Celia Moses spoke and asked that the board decide the school's fate for next year that night.

"The staff wants to know now which direction we're going," Moses said. "Half of them are packed, half are not. ... Right now, we're just waiting to see which direction [the board goes]."

While Georgia Brown's immediate future is now known, the larger decision about its remodel lingers, and it will have a domino effect on all of Paso's elementary schools. Georgia Brown's renovations are interlinked with Glen Speck Elementary School because Glen Speck would eventually occupy the new Georgia Brown campus.

Trustee Nathan Williams said that the recent hiccups have him rethinking the intricate elementary school plan that he voted for last year.

"This has hit heavily," Williams said. "While I've always said from the get-go there's no easy decision ... when you see something like this, this could cost us another six figures to just do the test, potentially. It's hard to sit here and know what the right choice is." Δ