Alachua County Commission asks School Board to review underutilized and vacant facilities to address homelessness; SBAC Chair says he’s ‘against that completely’

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Today, Alachua County Commission Chair Ken Cornell sent a letter to School Board of Alachua County Chair Thomas Vu, asking the school district to meet with other area organizations and review their “underutilized and vacant” School Board facilities “to better serve students and families experiencing homelessness.” However, Vu said at a workshop last week that he is “against that completely.”

The letter from Cornell cites data from the Alachua County Public Schools McKinney-Vento program, indicating that “more than 930 students leave the classroom each day without a stable place to call home.” At a recent Summit on Family Homelessness, Cornell wrote, “community leaders, service providers, and stakeholders reached a clear consensus that stronger coordination is essential to address this mattter.”

The letter asks the School Board to send representatives to a meeting within 60 days that would potentially include leadership from the City of Gainesville, the Children’s Trust of Alachua County, the Keys to Home Continuum of Care, and the County Commission “to develop a coordinated response to child and family homelessness.” The School Board was also asked to review its underutilized and vacant facilities “to better serve students and families experiencing homelessness.” The third request is for participating entities to “work collaboratively to implement strategies that improve access to services, increase housing stability for families, and ensure educational continuity for impacted students.”

However, after the County Commission passed a motion on April 28 to send the letter, School Board Chair Thomas Vu brought up the topic at the board’s April 29 workshop and said, “There’s this idea now that the school system should be solving the homelessness issue and putting the underhoused into our schools. And I just kind of want to say no, this Board Chair is against that completely… The school district should be investing our time and our resources into educating kids [and] into training our staff… It is not the school district’s job to solve the homelessness issue. And so I reject this idea, and I find it honestly a bit insulting that, again, the school district is asked to pick up the pieces of County and City policy.”

Superintendent Kamela Patton said the district would calculate the utilities and liability insurance for any underutilized buildings, “just so that they also would have a clear picture… If the board is willing to give a building away,… we would not be footing that cost to keep the electricity… We’re trying to get schools off our books.”

Vu said that if the school board turned a property over to a City, “what stops the municipality then from selling it to private developers and things like that?… We [would] need to have a clawback clause that this has to stay for the community; they can’t be opening up private residences [or] selling it for the construction of office parks [and] things like that. They have to use it for community purposes.”

Member Tina Certain said she had recently learned that the district has significant insurance exposure with vacant buildings. She agreed that it would be important to “keep the property in the public domain, and that we don’t just transfer it to them and then they sell it for commercial reasons or something. Because that has happened in our community before, with a building that was transferred by one governmental agency to another.”

Member Sarah Rockwell said they seemed to have consensus: “First of all, we want to get properties off our books if they’re empty. Secondly, that if we do transfer them to another government agency, we want them to stay for community use. But also, you know, if it’s something like a neighborhood school that is in a neighborhood, we may need to specify something about this homeless situation. I don’t think people want homeless shelters in the middle of their neighborhoods, you know.”

Rockwell also pointed out that a lot of the district’s properties are “not near other resources. They’re not on good bus routes… I feel like there’s a scramble to find housing because of St Francis House closing, but jumping on any empty property isn’t a good solution, because, again, if you’re not near other resources, healthcare, bus routes, all of these other things, that’s not going to actually do people a service.” She added that if the district decided to get involved in housing, she would want it to be for district employees.

Vu closed the discussion by agreeing with Rockwell: “If we were to even look into that idea, that’s the type of housing we would provide… instead of picking up the pieces caused not by us.”