ODESSA, Texas — It's now up to the school board whether or not there will be a big school bond in the May election, after the bond committee gave the board their recommendation during the January workshop meeting.
The goal is to keep the bond under $400 million. In this bond, the committee recommended facility life-cycle repair and replacement needs, a new CTE facility, a new high school and technology upgrades.
If taken at initial costs, the bond would run $60 million over budget, which is why the school board will be working with the bond committee to drop that number under $400 million.
Overall, this has been roughly two years in the making.
"We started this committee in December of '19 as a facilities review committee to look at what the district had and needed, and we met through February 25 of 2020, and then everything went south with COVID in March," Lorraine Perryman, co-chair of the bond committee, said.
While they were able to reconvene last year, it was still a long process. They began polling the community about what they want out of their school district, and they listened.
"The worst thing you can do is ask people what they think and not listen to them," Perryman said. "So they were very clear about what they wanted in the school district in this recommendation and how much they were willing to pay."
It's a laundry list of suggested improvements, but now it's up to the school board to decide.
"They will be working on this through February, and their second meeting in February is [to decide] if they're going to do a bond on May 7, which is what we recommended as a committee," Perryman said. "Then they have to call that bond at that time."