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The South Burlington School Board has known for years that it needs to confront elementary school overcrowding. Accordingly, it recently approved a plan to buy and use eight new classroom trailers.
Orchard Elementary and Rick Marcotte Central School would each receive four of the trailers. The structures are officially called zero-energy modular classrooms, or ZEMs for short.
“There was some discussion of timelines with these ZEMs being installed sometime in November,” interim superintendent Violet Nichols said during a Wednesday night school board meeting. “It’s sounding like a more realistic time frame would be January at this point in time.”
Just within the last week or so, the Vermont Agency of Education granted waivers for South Burlington which the district had asked for. These waivers will speed up the ZEM timeline somewhat by allowing South Burlington to bypass much of the usual bid process.
The eight new ZEMs — which will complement ZEMs already in use at Orchard and Rick Marcotte Central — will likely cost about $2,000,000. It’s still not clear just how the district will come up with the money.
“My suggestion to the board would be utilizing some of the $1,345,000 that we have left over in a bond,” Nichols said. “The ZEMs do qualify for use of this bond money.”
The ZEMs would be a stopgap measure until the district could execute another measure it’s discussed recently — moving fifth-graders to Tuttle Middle School. Even if that happens, it would be years away.
However, because the ZEMs would be only a short-term project, the district wouldn’t have to go to voters with another bond proposal to pay for them. Voter-approved bonds are required for long-term construction.
School board member Dr. Michelle Boyer asked, “What is the timeline for having the full plan for how the district will propose to fund the ZEMs?”
“We’ve only identified one potential funding source, which would be the bond,” Nichols answered. “And so the timeline could be as early as the August 3 board meeting.”
After completing everything else on it agenda, the board entered executive session to discuss Nichols’s one-year contract as interim superintendent. It never returned to open session after that.
This was the South Burlington school board’s first meeting in more than a decade without David Young as the superintendent. He left the position at the end of June to take the same job with Vermont’s Catholic school system.
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