An artist rendering of what the new Lubeck Elementary could look like after construction. Wood County Schools Superintendent Christie Willis said they hope to have a groundbreaking ceremony by the start of November. (Photo Provided)

PARKERSBURG — Making the decision to build a new school can take years of planning and preparation before a shovel even touches dirt. And the road to get there can have many turns and detours along the way.

“Every 10 years we are required to do the Comprehensive Education Facilities Plan, the CEFP,” Wood County Board of Education President Justin Raber said. “We did that in 2020, because it’s from 2020 to 2030.”

Raber said it looks at all of the facilities within the district, and what needs to happen to those facilities over the next decade.

“So for us it’s, what improvements do we need to make? What is the size of our student population? Do we have too many facilities? And it looks at all of that,” Raber said. “So for a district like us, and the vast majority of West Virginia, the question is, we have old facilities, we have too many facilities. So what do we do?”

Raber said what came out of that was the need to consolidate some schools. He said those included the combination of Neale and Vienna Elementary into one Vienna school, Criss and Emerson Elementary into a new North End school, and the building of a new school in Lubeck.

“So we moved forward with the bond, developed the bond call and put that out to the voters,” Raber said.

Residents of Wood County approved the $60.85 million bond issue in May of 2022 with another $21 million coming from the West Virginia School Building Authority (SBA).

Raber said there are various hoops they then had to jump through in order to sell those bonds. This included getting ratings for the bonds, gathering and providing financial information and getting approval from the State Attorney General’s office to sell the bonds.

“That sat on the attorney general’s desk for months upon months,” Raber said.

Raber said the SBA had skipped a funding cycle and that another part of selling the bonds was getting the $28 million funding from them.

“We wanted to sell the bonds,” Superintendent of Wood County Schools Christie Willis said. “And if they weren’t going to have a funding cycle to do grant awards, we couldn’t sell without their commitment.”

Willis said this was the start of the year-long wait to sell the bonds and begin projects.

Raber and Willis said in the fall of 2022 they took a trip to Charleston to talk to the SBA about the situation and were advised to apply for a planning grant.

The SBA awarded the district a $100,000 planning grant soon after, which would provide money for a survey, environmental budget and geotechnical budget.

Raber said this was a loan on the $28 million expected to come later. He said during this waiting they began advocating to local House of Delegates members to help get things moving. Willis said they were very supportive.

“The delegates have been great,” Willis said.

The bonds were then sold in December of 2023 to JPMorgan Securities LLC and Joe Nassif, municipal advisor and managing director at Piper Sandler, told the board then that this benefits voters and the district in two ways. First, by saving them $1.4 million in reduced taxes with the rate coming in under 4.5%, and second, by getting an added $1.37 million in premium proceeds.

The search for the new Lubeck Elementary site began in November of 2022, Willis said. She said she met with eight potential sellers and gave them a deadline to submit a price they would be willing to sell at.

“The one that we purchased is the lowest amount that we received of the three,” Willis said.

The 31.23 acre site, located at 143 Clark Road in Washington, was purchased for $755,000 in March of this year. Raber said the other two offers were well above a million dollars and Willis said all the properties they looked at would need utilities.

Willis said there were also other variables the district had to look at when purchasing a property.

“West Virginia code says students cannot be on the bus more than 45 minutes,” Willis said. “If you build a new school, you have to adhere to that. So Lubeck moving down there helps us with the bus routes on that end of the county.”

Raber explained that doing an appraisal on the property based on its current residential/farmland use would not be comparable to its future commercial use as a school site and that county appraisals also typically come in lower than actual market value. He said an appraisal also only reflects the property value at a single point in time and if an appraisal came back higher than expected, the seller could ask for more money. And a commercial appraisal would likely be even higher, driving up the price further.

He said they looked at other data like the county tax assessment and spoke to economic development professionals about typical land values.

“The professional advice that we received vastly supported this purchase,” Raber said. “No one has said professionally we overpaid for this property.”

Willis said there were five meetings with various groups leading up to the purchase of the Lubeck site to ask the public and teachers what they would like to see in a new school. She said two public meetings were held at Williamstown and the Wood County Tech Center and then three staff and administrator meetings were held at Criss, Lubeck and Vienna Elementary.

Assistant Superintendent of Operations Kaleb Lawrence said planning for the new Lubeck school began six months ago and the staff at Williamstown Elementary was also asked to provide information on things at their new school that they liked or would like to see changed.

“We said, “Tell us what you don’t like about the building. Now that you’ve worked there. How does it function?” We got three pages back from the staff and we incorporated that with McKinley and Pickering (into the new Lubeck design).” Lawrence said. “We tried to meet the needs of what the general consensus was, what they would like to see and so that was really the six months of back and forth (with McKinley and Pickering).”

Designs are still evolving and changing but progress and current artist renderings of what the school could look like can be found on the district’s website at woodcountyschoolswv.com/page/facilities-bond.

Willis said she hopes there will be a groundbreaking ceremony soon.

“Dirt should be moving no later than November,” Willis said.

Douglass Huxley can be reached at dhuxley@newsandsentinel.com