With the $75 million general obligation bond receiving overwhelming voter approval Nov. 4, City Schools Decatur’s next step seems to include a definitive plan detailing priorities and a timeline for new schools construction.
Board Chairman Garrett Goebel also pointed out Tuesday it was way too early to speculate how the old East Lake Elementary will be used, or even if the board will decide to lease at all.
“It’s (new Superintendent David Dude’s) job to prepare the details, the timeline, to decide which solutions are interim and which are permanent,” Goebel said. “Until he does that, and then presents it to the board, there’s little I can say.”
One factor possibly complicating any building plans is recent projections that CSD’s growth, which has been in the seven to 12 percent range each year since 2009, will taper to about five percent growth from 2019-20 to 2020-21. But whether this signals an actual growth decline is anybody’s guess.
“We may wind up seeing peaks and valleys in growth (instead of sustained escalation),” Goebel said. “(Projection accuracy) gets harder the further out you go. This is why we have multiple phases of construction, so we can guard against overbuilding. ”
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