The clock is ticking on the future of Georgia Brown Elementary, Paso Robles school district’s dual immersion program, and the 36th Street campus.
“I will be very frank,” Paso Robles Assistant Superintendent Brad Pawlowski told the Paso Robles Joint Unified District school board during its Aug. 22 meeting. “If we relocate this program, the school is going to close. … We need to determine first what we want to research—and we need to make sure all of this is public knowledge.”
After a tumultuous three-year period that included an initial recommendation to close the 36th Street campus, a pivot to full-scale renovations instead, and the discovery of an anomalous geological feature that stymied those renovation efforts, the Paso school district is back at square one.
“If we are going to have public acceptance, we need to redo the information-gathering process,” Superintendent Curt Dubost said at the meeting.
The board voted on two different action items that evening, both of which Pawlowski and Dubost hope will alleviate public concern voiced at the Aug. 7 and 8 meetings about the efforts made in 2020 that spawned the current situation.
In 2020, the information-gathering process was headed by a 7/11 committee—the state requires a committee of seven to 11 people to form in cases where a state-owned essential property may be subject to being sold—as the future of the 36th Street campus was uncertain.
Board members criticized the committee on Aug. 22, especially member Kenney Enney, who questioned how committee members had even gathered the information needed to make a recommendation to close the 36th Street campus. To counter this concern, the board decided to establish a new district advisory committee, instead of another 7/11.
“When you consider a situation like this you may need more than 11 members to do what the board is looking for,” Pawlowski told the board, “[Because] a 7/11 committee is only required if you are selling the property, it might be better to make a district advisory committee to address the board’s needs.”
As a result, the board voted 6-0—with board member Sondra Williams absent—to move forward and authorize a capacity and boundary study for district staff to determine what their options might be if the school had to be closed.
“These two focuses will answer some of the questions that we have asked,” board member Jim Cogan said at the meeting. “We don’t have the exact methodology [for how they did it in 2020] so this new capacity study in particular is important.”
The board also voted 5-1—with member Dorian Baker dissenting—to have staff come forward with an application for a new committee by the next board meeting.
Dubost said the board needed to approve a committee of some form to gather this information sooner rather than later.
“It’s something we need to discuss at this next meeting with our attorney present, so you can make a call on what we are going to do [with the campus] by February,” Dubost told the board. “Otherwise, you are going to run out of time.”
Board President Nathan Williams emphasized that the board had not made any decisions on the status of the campus itself.
“Everything comes back to us,” Williams told the board. “They are going to find information based on what we lay out and then from there we can make a decision, but the community needs to know we have not made that decision yet.” Δ
This article appears in Aug 24 – Sep 3, 2023.