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Talks to sell high school collapse

After two meetings, the Diocese of St. Petersburg and the county school district cannot agree on terms.

The Diocese of St. Petersburg will not be selling its Bishop McLaughlin High School to the Pasco County School District.

Both sides met to discuss the possible sale and quickly discovered they could not overcome three deal-breaking issues: the price, the timing and the relocation to a school site nearby.

"We have ended those discussions after a total of two meetings," said Elizabeth Deptula, who oversees matters involving real estate and construction for the diocese.

From the start, the possible sale was described as a long shot at best. But there was one compelling reason why both sides thought they should entertain the possibility. The diocese has a beautiful new school and few students to fill it, while the school district has plenty of students and needs classroom space to fit them all.

Evidently, Bishop Robert Lynch drove a hard bargain. The bishop wanted $35-million to part with the 2-year-old school, a dollar figure he was not inclined to negotiate, Deptula said. The school was built in 2003 for $22-million. He planned to use the money to build another, smaller school and to start a $10-million endowment to fund scholarships well into the future.

The bishop also promised parents that if the school were sold, a new high school would be built within 3 to 5 miles of the Bishop McLaughlin school. Those terms proved to be tough to meet.

"We told them we would have to negotiate the price, and we would have to get two appraisals," said Pasco superintendent Heather Fiorentino. "And we knew that the longer they held off the less it would work for us."

The school district couldn't afford to wait the year and a half to two years it would take for the diocese to find a new site and build a new school. The price also was problematic. The district spends roughly $42-million on a high school these days. But the Bishop McLaughlin High School is small for a public high school. It is more the size of a middle school.

"We really had to consider it," Fiorentino said. "I am going to look at anything inside the box or outside the box to help solve our school overcrowding."

The Catholic high school opened two years ago on 90 acres in rural Shady Hills to great fanfare. Gov. Jeb Bush was the keynote speaker at the opening. It has become a model of educational technology.

Despite all that, enrollment has grown slowly. The school is built to house 800 students and opened with about 50. Now, nearing the end of its second school year, enrollment is up to about 100. The school serves ninth- and 10th-graders with the next two grade levels to be added.

Now the diocese and the school are working on boosting enrollment and getting ready for next school year.

"We feel we needed to eliminate the uncertainty for parents," diocese spokeswoman Vicki Wells Bedard said.