Burrell's Huston Middle School isn't getting air conditioning after bids came in too high

Students at Burrell School District’s Huston Middle School won’t be learning in air-conditioned classrooms any time soon.

The school board Tuesday rejected bids to install air conditioning at the school. That’s because bids for the work, which was projected to cost about $1.2 million, came in at around $1.6 million.

“We’re going to wipe out all our funds if we do it now,” board member Rick Kaczor said.

The money for the middle school air conditioning was supposed to come from the district’s capital reserve fund, according to Superintendent Shannon Wagner.

However, she said, that fund contains only $1.6 million. And moving forward with nothing in that fund is a prospect neither Wagner nor the board wanted to entertain.

Instead, they talked about playing the long game, pushing the project down the road and possibly making it part of a larger project to install air conditioning in all of Burrell’s schools.

In the district’s two elementary schools, middle school and high school, there is air conditioning only in certain rooms. For example, in the high school, only the administrative offices, library, computer rooms and the conference room where the board meets are air-conditioned.

“We want to do all the buildings, but because this building is so high (in cost), we figure maybe we wait and do a bond issue to do them all,” Wagner said.

Kaczor agreed: “It may be better to do a bond rather than spend all our money.”

Easing the financial crunch, Wagner said, is the fact that some bonds previously issued by the district are due to be paid off in the near future.

She noted that a districtwide air-conditioning project likely would be part of a larger conversation school officials may be having about how many schools the district will have in the future in light of declining enrollment.

“We’re trying to decide, ‘Do we need four buildings?’ ” Wagner said, adding it would make no sense to pay to install air conditioning in a building only to close it later.