MARION COUNTY, Fla. – The superintendent of Marion County Public Schools confirmed her district is in a crisis as it deals with aging schools and record growth.
“It’s not to be overly dramatic. When you look at the data, the growth and our facilities. When you have about half our facilities are over 50 years old, the cost of maintenance continues to climb,” said Dr. Diane Gullet, superintendent of Marion County Schools.
News 6 went inside some of the schools in need of repairs and upgrades.
At East Marion Elementary School in Ocala, none of its classrooms have doors. Instead, a large room is broken up into four pods. Each pod contains a different class.
“The students are adaptable. They are resilient, but there are times when you know we’re doing fun and exciting things and maybe the class next door is needing to be testing,” said Sarah Dobbs, principal of East Marion Elementary School.
East Marion Elementary was built in the early 1970s, and not much has changed.
“Thinking safety wise, these doors we walked through are the original doors for this pod, so they’re on a magnet system. When we release the magnet they lock us in. This is between us and 80 students,” Dobbs said. “Student safety is the first thing that goes through my mind when talking about this concept, this layout.”
Fort King Middle School was built in 1963. The school’s gymnasium still has its original bleachers and is now just getting air conditioning.
“If we wanted to air condition the gym, we would have to open the doors and turn on the blowers an they would cycle air through the gym,” said Michael Carter, principal of Fort King Middle School.
Meantime, leaders said the maintenance costs at Lake Weir Middle School have gotten so expensive it would just be cheaper to tear the building down and build a new school.
According to the superintendent, “Our portables don’t have covered walkways. We have air condition systems that go out. We have leaks. They impact our ability to provide adequate instruction.”
News 6 investigated and discovered 80% of Marion County’s school maintenance requests do not get fixed because the district does not have the $840 million to do it. Some of the maintenance money used to come Public Education Capital Outlay funds, also known as PECO. The dollars came from fees from telephone landlines, but the state stopped distributing the money to the district in 2019.
As for lottery dollars, they mostly fund secondary education and Bright Futures Scholarships. This is why the superintendent for Marion County is turning to voters to approve a half-cent sales tax and impact fees.
“It’s been 15 years since there’s been a sales tax for our facility needs, and it’s been 13 years since we’ve had impact fees since they were suspended,” she told News 6.
If approved, the impact fees will help handle growth and build new schools and wings. According to school leaders, only five new schools have been built in Marion County since the first iPhone was released in 2007. Now, the district is seeing record enrollment. Its student population grew by 9% in the last decade.
“We have to run three lunches,” Carter said. “We start at 11:15 and we go ‘til 1 o’clock with lunches just to fit everyone in.”
It is up to Marion County commissioners to decide whether the half-cent sales tax and impact fees end up on the November ballot.
See News 6′s investigation into Orange County school maintenance.
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