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School Shuffle Goes On Saturday, Feb 23, 2008 By Doug Thompson OK. Let me get this straight. A committee appointed by the Fayetteville School Board is studying our best option for a better high school. Then another committee was appointed to negotiate a sale of the existing high school to the University of Arkansas. A simple mind might think we're set to build a new high school if we're selling the old one. However, the price you could get does have an impact on things, I suppose. Finding out a price is good. I would have found a price by sticking a "For Sale" sign in the front yard of the high school and getting an offer rather than appointing a committee, but let's not quibble. Then the board made plans to appoint another committee. It will - best I can tell - tell the negotiating committee what to negotiate for. I've never negotiated a deal worth somewhere north of $50 million. However, I think "Get the best price you can" would do for instructions. Then I hear a board member say we need to look at the sale of the high school as something visionary, "something more than a real estate transaction." That's a sales pitch. For instance, one supposed benefit of selling the high school would be stronger ties between the university and the school district. OK. The high school, the flagship campus of the district, is right next to the university. Simple me, I'd think selling that campus and moving away would do more to cut ties, even if the property is sold to the university. If I love my neighbor, I don't think selling my house to him so I can afford to move to a more upscale neighborhood is the best way to foster a closer relationship. We're considering a sale of public property to pay for a state-of-the-art high school here. Show me the cash. If you can't show me enough cash, I'm not interested. It doesn't matter what else you offer. How much cash is enough cash? That depends on what we're going to buy. We won't know the cost until we have a design, we're told. Now I'm just a layman, but there's been a few high schools built around her recently. It seems like there's a pretty sound basis for better estimates than that. Build Smart, a private group that seems to know more than the board these days, has numbers: Lots of numbers. They filled a spreadsheet with them in fact. They did it weeks ago and patiently answered questions about them. I was impressed, but didn't do anything with those numbers because the sale of the existing campus to the university seemed dead. Now, suddenly, that sale's alive again. I guess those numbers are relevant now. I guess I'd better call Build Smart back, apologize and go through them again, since these seems to be the only numbers anybody has. I want to know what the cost of a replacement high school is before we sell the one we've got. Call me simplistic. Then there's the matter of where you get the cash. I have a daughter enrolled in the University of Arkansas next year. Apparently, the university is going to hike tuition if it buys the high school. OK. The university's going to charge me more. That way, my school district won't raise my taxes. Lucky me. Speaking of sales jobs, I'm slowly reconciling myself to the idea that Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., will probably be the Democratic presidential nominee. Sen. Hillary Clinton's not out, but she's down. She can, in theory, stop Obama if she wins Texas and Ohio. There's another side to that. She has to win both contests. He only has to win one, and he has enough time and much more money. In a perceptive comparison, Friday's edition of the German magazine Spiegel compares Hillary Clinton to a good, solid engineering firm whose stock is on the same market as the dot-coms of the 1980s and 1990s. She has all the sound economic fundamentals, but Obama.com has the rising stock, because a promise of winning the lottery is so much more appealing than the promise of hard work. --------- Doug Thompson is a Fayetteville-based reporter and columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau and the Morning News. His e-mail address is dthompson@arkansasnews.com. |
