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Schools

Many missteps toward a makeshift campus

The state DOT paid $11.6-million for a campus laden with mold and students still don't have a permanent building.

By MELANIE AVE
Published October 22, 2005

TAMPA - By the time a new Oak Park Elementary School is finished in 2007, its students will have spent up to four years on a temporary campus made up entirely of portables.

The 480 children, from one of Tampa's poorest neighborhoods, wait for their buses in the glaring sun. When it rains, they get soaked. Their food is carried over each day from a middle school next door.

There is no auditorium. No gym. No playground.

No other Hillsborough County students have ever spent so long in portables.

A Times investigation shows it didn't have to be this way. Oak Park's move to a makeshift campus could have been avoided altogether, or at a minimum, its time there could have been much shorter.

The school district spent three years negotiating a deal with the Florida Department of Transportation, which wanted a small part of the school's land for the widening of Interstate 4. The DOT plan would have kept the old school running, but district officials quashed it at the last minute.

What happened next was bizarre:

The school district closed Oak Park, saying the widening of I-4 would bring traffic dangerously close to campus. Until then, district officials had expressed few concerns about safety.

DOT was forced to buy the entire school - at a cost to taxpayers of $11.6-million. Only then did DOT learn the buildings were riddled with mold and essentially worthless.

DOT officials wonder whether the school district's real motivation was to rid itself of an unhabitable campus. And many Oak Park parents think their children are being slighted because most are poor and their test scores are lagging.

"I don't think this would have taken place in Temple Terrace or Hyde Park," said parent Keshia Johnson, an African-American whose daughter Jaisha is a fourth-grader. "I don't think it's a race issue. It's a class issue. To me, it just wasn't a priority for the district to build a school."

For more than 90 years - through two world wars, a Depression, legal segregation and mandatory integration - Oak Park Elementary served a working-class neighborhood in east Tampa.

In recent years, that neighborhood has become increasingly industrial, poor and minority. Three out of four Oak Park students are black. Nine out of 10 are poor enough to qualify for free lunches.

The red brick school was one of the neighborhood's few constants, the place where generations of families were educated.

"It was a very vital part of the neighborhood," said former principal Rosa Martin.

But life at the school took a big turn in 1999, when state transportation officials announced the details of a $158-million project to widen I-4 from 14th Street to 50th Street. Columbus Drive would move south, closer to the school, and 50th would be widened.

School officials were told the project would swallow about 10 to 15 parking spaces at Oak Park and eliminate a bus loop, retention pond and part of a playground. In all, DOT needed about 1.4 acres of the school's 8.7-acre property - just a "sliver," according to DOT officials.

That sliver would consume years of futile negotiations.

The two sides agreed that losing the land would hurt the school. So DOT decided to buy adjacent property and offer it as compensation. Oak Park would be able to expand westward.

Mary Arend, the DOT's interstate consultant manager, bought five properties and paid at least four families to relocate. The cost: more than $550,000.

Records show school district administrators knew what DOT was doing. A district consultant even suggested terms that were worked into DOT's offer.

In March 2002, the DOT made its proposal: It would pay up to $1.2-million for the 1.4 acres, plus hand over the five properties. A wall would be built to separate the school from busy 50th Street.

Arend said in court records that her agency "bent over backwards" to work with the district. She thought the two sides were very close to closing a deal that would keep the school open.

Then Arend got a surprise.

Meanwhile, problems were surfacing at the school. Some people suspect they played a significant role in its closure.

In spring 2002, Oak Park earned an F grade from the state. It was one of the first Hillsborough schools to receive a failing grade under Gov. Jeb Bush's school accountability program.

District officials were embarrassed. They announced plans to improve Oak Park.

Some parents were skeptical.

David Williams, a former Oak Park PTA president, said it had long been rumored that officials wanted to close the school. The rumor was "they were going to close it or break it up," he said. "It wasn't going to be a community school."

In fact, about the time district officials learned specifics of DOT's interstate project, they floated the idea of converting Oak Park to a magnet. Many of the neighborhood kids would be dispersed to make room for white students bused in from the suburbs.

Parents objected, and the idea was shelved.

As the spring of 2002 turned to fall, Arend heard little from school officials. She was told School Board attorney Crosby Few would look the deal over and send it to the board for approval.

It never happened.

In October 2002, Few told DOT officials the deal was off. The agency would have to buy the entire property.

Three years of negotiations were over.

School officials told parents the big problem was safety.

"Those big old semis go flying down there all the time," Few said in a recent interview. "It would have been a terribly hazardous situation."

But to DOT officials, Few emphasized other concerns. He told them they had no legal right to require a land swap.

While Few's assessment was accurate, the deal could have gone through, said Milton Corson, who appraised Oak Park for DOT. DOT could not require a land swap, he said, but the two sides could have legally negotiated any deal they wanted.

This much is clear: If school officials had told DOT about their legal and safety concerns when negotiations began in 2000, Oak Park students may not have had to spend a single day in portables. The district would have had enough time to build a new school by 2002 - a full year before DOT needed the Oak Park land.

Instead, with input from parents, the district agreed to move the students to portables until a new school could be built.

Still, parents were upset.

"I didn't think it was fair that the highway was more important than education," said Betty Odne, the PTA president.

In June 2003, DOT agreed to pay $11.6-million for the school - 20 times the price DOT had expected when negotiations began.

Oak Park closed in the summer of 2003.

Some DOT officials still wonder why school officials closed Oak Park and insisted it be sold. Was the district's real motive to unload a sick school plagued with mold?

Records show mold was such a familiar part of Oak Park life that principal Joyce Miles regularly instructed her custodians to clean all surfaces with a bleach and water mixture.

"It was on the walls. On the doors. Corkboards. Anything that's organic," said Doug Nelson, the corporate director of health and safety at WRS Infrastructure & Environment Inc., which took samples for DOT.

But DOT didn't learn about the mold until after it bought the school. An analysis showed the likely causes were leaky roofs and windows and a faulty air-conditioning system.

DOT had to give up plans to rent the school to others, which it had hoped would recoup some of the cost.

The school is now boarded up, except for the media center. The cafeteria - built in 1993 as part of a $5-million schoolwide renovation - was so riddled with mold it had to be torn down.

Hillsborough schools safety director Glen Lathers denies Oak Park had a serious mold problem. When asked for records about the school, Lathers produced reports that said little about mold.

But school records obtained through DOT show the mold problem dated at least to 1997. It was so bad at one point that black dust spewed through vents and one employee filed a workers' compensation claim.

Deborah Bridges, a former school employee, said mold grew on telephones, on the back of a closet door in the administration building and even covered a plastic plant in the principal's conference room. "My dermatologist and I had a good time with Oak Park," said Bridges, who now works at Roosevelt Elementary. "The mold would attach to my face and grow on my face. I've not had one single problem since I left that building."

Few, who retired as School Board attorney last year, said he did not know about the mold when he decided the school should be closed. He also said he knew nothing of the school's well-publicized academic struggles.

"I wasn't familar with that," he said.

Richard Vickers, a DOT attorney, said the entire campus will need to be torn down. DOT plans to sell the land when the road project is completed.

When asked if he thought the school district used DOT to get money for a new school, Vickers said: "Certainly it has occurred to us. But we really can't judge the motivations of the School Board."

Superintendent MaryEllen Elia insists the district did not close the school because the children are poor, their test scores low or because the campus was moldy. She thinks the mold problems may have worsened when the DOT closed the school and turned off the air-conditioning.

"We don't throw away our schools," she said.

Oak Park students now are in their third year in the maze of 54 gray portables sitting between James K-8 School and Williams Middle School on Ellicott Street in east Tampa.

Dana Underberg, whose son is a fifth-grader at Oak Park, drives by the old school every day. Despite the safety concerns expressed by district officials, she said she hardly notices the wider roads around it.

"It's a joke," Underberg said. "I'm just disgusted."

Last month, school officials showed parents a drawing of the new Oak Park, which will be built just north of the old school. Two of the three properties needed for the new school are being condemned by the school district. Construction should begin by the summer of 2006.

After the meeting, Keshia Johnson shrugged her shoulders.

"She won't get to be in it," Johnson said of her daughter, a fourth-grade gifted student.

"Why not?" the girl asked, a hurt expression on her face.

"Because you'll be too old."

When the new Oak Park opens sometime in 2007, Jaisha Johnson will be in middle school.

[Last modified October 22, 2005, 01:14:12]