First the city of Brentwood offered money in May to help expand Williamson County Schools capacity, now Franklin has followed suit.
The WCS board gave its blessing on Monday to a 50-50 split with the city of Franklin for the cost of constructing a new middle school on Henpeck Lane.
The project, the district estimates, will cost $2.36 million, with WCS pulling from Adequate School Facilities tax revenue for its share. Franklin will pop the cork on the construction by building increased sewage capacity on the site.
WCS expects to deliver the school by 2020.
Superintendent Dr. Mike Looney has responded to a tense budget and capital funding process by seeking creative solutions. Also on Monday, Looney made a concession to his county overseers, in getting a $6 million cut to the 2017-18 WCS budget approved by the WCS board. When first asked to find a way to cut the schools budget from $343 million to $338 he balked, saying that the budget was already as tough-choice lean as it could possibly be when he presented it to the county. He told the cCountyBudget Committee, which enforced the cut, they tied his hands into making a decision that could affect education quality. He said the district would likely need to cut back on how many more teachers it hired for the coming year in which an expected 2,000 new students would enter the district.
The district did find $6 million to cut, taking the funding request down to $337 million, but not in personnel. Instead, a bite got taken out of premium payments made for employees of the district.
In May, the Brentwood city commission pledged to pay $2.4 million toward the county’s debt service on an expansion of Brentwood High and Middle Schools. The cash, to come out of Brentwood’s Adequate Facilities Tax, came with the condition that the WCS rezoning Plan B not pass. The plan, which in fact did not pass, sparked parent protest for its proposed cutting up of high school lines in north-central Williamson County.
The same night in May that Brentwood solidified its offer, the Brentwood expansion plan at a cost of $17.2 passed a County Commission vote.
