If approved, facility on Black Horse Lane would house central staff.
By:Melissa Hayes
The parking lot at the Board of Education office on Executive Drive is packed. The parking spaces fill quickly and many employees are forced to park on both sides of Executive Drive, making it tight for buses to pass through.
Boxes filled with student files sit on the floor of various offices. Storage closets are filled wall-to-wall with filling cabinets and boxes of financial records are piled on top of and in front of them.
The lone garage bay, where more than 75 school buses are serviced, is in use round the clock. Any garage space not being used by district mechanics is filled with spare tires, bathroom supplies for the schools and paper for the district office copiers and printers. A fenced-in area known as the cage is filled to the ceiling with computers and other technology department deliveries.
This space crunch is one of the main reasons the district is looking to lease a 30,822-square-foot office building at 231 Black Horse Lane.
Jeff Scott, assistant superintendent for business, said the district would use the new office in addition to the existing one, which was purchased in 1970.
A public hearing on the issue will be held Monday at 8 p.m. in the auditorium of Crossroads North Middle School on Georges Road in Monmouth Junction
Employees in the current building have gotten used to the conditions, even though it makes work difficult.
Sue Davis, secretary for the professional development department, has a wall of boxes beside her desk.
"They’re dictionaries for the elementary schools," she said.
Ms. Davis said having boxes in already cramped office space is not uncommon.
Almost all of the offices in the student services portion of the building house two to four district employees. The department’s files are in one of many crowded closets, making it difficult to locate documents.
"Right now, we have up to four people sharing one office," said Mr. Scott. He said this can get in the way of privacy, confidentiality and productivity
"If somebody sneezes, there’s about 15 people that say God bless," Mr. Scott said.
The building has two conference rooms, one seats about 35 people and one seats about 10. When the rooms are booked, staff members are forced to have group meetings of no more than five people in some of the larger offices, or they must request space in a school or the Monmouth Junction Fire Department depending on how much space is needed.
The personnel department, business department and superintendent’s secretaries are in one room partitioned by filling cabinets that are stuffed to capacity.
There are at least 15 people in the room, making it hard to hear when more than one person is using the phone.
"That has to cut into productivity and efficiency of operations," Mr. Scott said.
Even the offices that don’t have four employees using them are in a space crunch. Some employees have so many boxes under their desks that there is no room for their legs.
The school board has been looking for a solution to its space issue for several months, and hopes to use the Black Horse Lane building for at least 10 years.
"It’s a better design than the current building and the building is younger than this building and it has the office space that we need," Mr. Scott said.
He said there are 51 employees who work in the board office and most of them would be moved to the new office, though he was unsure which departments would be relocated.
"By moving people out of this building we can reconfigure this building so it more effectively can be used as a maintenance facility," Mr. Scott said. "We can create two more garage bays if we have a place to store items in the garage."
Community Education is currently run out of Crossroads South Middle School and would be relocated to the new building. It would pay rent for the office space, Mr. Scott said.
Mr. Scott said, rent for the first five years, including taxes and building insurance, would be $225,000 a year, minus a credit of $106,250, which would be spread over the first two years.
The credit is the equivalent of five months free rent.
"That’s just part of the negotiation. We also have use of all the furniture in the building so it’s a good deal," Mr. Scott said.
Rent for the following five years would be $306,000 per year. If the board were to renew the lease for an additional 10 years, the rent would increase to $367,200 per year for the first five years and $440,640 each year for the remaining five years.
Rent would come out of the district’s general fund.
"When you look at what office space is going for you could spend up to $20 a square foot. Our deal is less than half of that. Financially, it solves our needs without severe financial impact," he said.
Mr. Scott said the district would be renting a building rather than buying because of price.
"For the amount of space that we need, the costs at this point would be prohibitive to go out to purchase and we would need a referendum," he said.

