The Evesham Township School District is soliciting bids for a real estate broker service that would work with the district to lease Evans Elementary School to a third party.
The Board of Education approved the decision at its Sept. 22 meeting, which was the first meeting of the board since Aug. 22 when the state Department of Education issued an approval for the closure of Evans effective July 1, 2017.
In support for closing the school, district officials have cited demography studies predicting a continued decline in enrollment across the district, with enrollment having already declined by more than 1,000 students since a peak of 5,436 students in 2003.
Evesham Township’s municipal government and planning board have disputed such predictions, but BOE President Joseph De Julius said the board could not comment on whether the district was still involved in litigation with either party regarding the issue.
Once Evans has closed and its students have moved to other schools in the district, the district eventually hopes to lease Evans to generate additional yearly revenue.
According to district business administrator John Recchinti, the district felt it best to hire outside professionals to handle the process of finding a tenant, just as the district would when hiring professionals to handle areas such as health insurance or engineering needs.
“We don’t have the expertise as far as having the ability to find people to lease the building … we thought it would be better to engage a broker to provide that service,” Recchinti said.
Once brokers have provided bids to the district for their services, Recchinti said the bids would come back to the board for review and final approval.
“Then we can sit down with that broker and plan how we can move forward in finding a tenant and what type of tenant we would want in there, and then they would go out and look for the tenant to use the building,” he said.
Once the broker has found suitable tenants, Recchinti said the potential agreements would be brought before the board’s finance committee for further review.
Any final agreement with any one or multiple tenants would then have to go before the full board for final approval.
“I think we would try to find a lessee that would want to use the building in the current state that it’s in. That would be most advantageous for the board, because if someday we wanted to return it to a school, we wouldn’t have major renovations to the building,” Recchinti said.
Board member Sandy Student questioned if it would be possible to charge eventual tenants for the cost of the broker’s services so the district would not incur the cost itself.
Recchinti said that could be included as a condition of any potential lease agreement with tenants, but then potential tenants might also take that into consideration and offer a lower for rent.
Recchinti also said he believed by law the district could only lease the building for up to five years at one time, but the district would most likely structure any eventual lease as five separate one-year agreements, so at the end of every year, the district could end the lease if it so decided.
