District Considering Selling Former School, District Office

From New Haven Unified School District

The Board of Education on Tuesday night appointed a committee to study and report back to the Board on the possibility of selling surplus property, to generate funds to help offset the District’s ongoing cash challenges caused by continuing state cuts to the education budget.

The sites under consideration are the Educational Services Center and the campus where Cabello Elementary School and later the Cabello Student Support Center were located. The school was closed in 2007 and the Support Center moved last year to the ESC, the District office.

If the ESC property is sold, the District office would move to empty rooms at the former Barnard-White Middle School campus, where the District has been renting facilities to outside groups – in an effort to generate income to mitigate the continuing budget cuts referenced above – since 2009.

The nine-member committee will be asked to recommend to the Board whether to sell one property, both properties, or neither property.

The committee includes residents of the neighborhoods where the sites are located, District parents and teachers, and business and civic representatives. Members were selected with the goal that the committee would mirror the ethnic, age and socioeconomic composition of the District.

The committee will meet twice next week, then hold a public hearing at 6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 1, at the ESC. The public hearing, originally scheduled for Sept. 26, was postponed to avoid a conflict with the Board of Education candidates forum being sponsored at the ESC that evening by the League of Women Voters.

Following the public hearing, the committee will meet a fourth time to finalize its report to the Board, which is scheduled to consider the matter at its Oct. 16 meeting.

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