By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The school district is weighing a series of long-and short-term considerations about managing its space needs that could include reopening the former Valley Road School and renting a satellite office for its central administration, while officials prepare for the upcoming bond referendum.
In the face of rising enrollment from residential development, district officials are looking at their options. One possibility is reusing Valley Road, the part that today houses the central administration, and moving those administrators to another location.
District administrators, including Superintendent of Schools Stephen C. Cochrane, last week visited the office of the Princeton Packet, which recently was sold by former Packet publisher James B. Kilgore to businesswoman Helena May. Under one scenario, those administrators could move up Witherspoon Street, with the paper leaving the building in December.
“So if this becomes some of the swing space, then kids would move into here back to a school. The administration office has to go somewhere,” district business administrator Stephanie Kennedy said Monday from Valley Road.
“So we’d be looking to rent that space ,” she said of the Packet building. “W e would rent the space for a three-to five-year period until whenever our long-term plan would be completed.”
More long-term, the district next month will hire an architect to help guide the district — and the community — through a bond referendum sometime in 2018. A communication strategy is something the district has discussed with firms vying for the contract.
In terms of the amount of the referendum, officials do not have a number in mind.
“I wouldn’t want to speculate on that,” Mr. Cochrane said Monday.
For her part, Mayor Liz Lempert said Monday that school board members she had spoken with told her the district is “trying to arrange the timing so that the new referendum would be timed to when the old debt is starting to be retired” to avoid a big spike in property taxes.
“It’s likely necessary for them to expand facilities,” Mayor Lempert said. “I support them in trying to figure out how to time it in a way that’s going to have as minimal a negative impact as possible.”
