Los Cariños Charter School has poured almost $200,000 in taxpayer dollars into its unused property in Santa Cruz and continues to pay its landlord, David Chyo, $4,500 a month to keep eight empty portable classrooms there, according to school documents.
But the likelihood the school will ever move to the proposed campus looks increasingly remote.
Los Cariños Governing Board President Father Terry Brennan said Monday the Santa Cruz campus, located just west of the intersection of State Road 76 and State Road 106, is still “one of three options” the school is pursuing.
However, in a Dec. 4 letter, Brennan formally accepted the Española School Board’s offer to allow the charter school to move into the District’s central administration building on Calle Don Diego when administrators relocate this summer to the former Española seventh grade school site on Hunter Street. Los Cariños currently leases the old seventh grade school from the District.
In the letter, Brennan appointed Los Cariños Board member Priscilla Trujillo to the District’s construction committee to help “develop a facility transition plan” and requested plans and specifications for the central office building “to help make plans to revert (administration offices) into classrooms.
And though the District’s Board has said emphatically the charter school cannot stay at its current location past June 30, Brennan has his sights set on changing their minds.
“Let’s just say all things are possible. It still is an option,” Brennan said. “Those are ideas that we’d like to discuss at the proper time.”
Los Cariños Chancellor Vernon Jaramillo also hinted moving the school to Santa Cruz is unlikely.
“I believe (Brennan) is very much aware of circumstances surrounding (the Santa Cruz campus), and that’s why he’s looking for a another location, in a public facility,” Jaramillo said.
Under its lease agreement with Chyo, which began in February, the school currently pays $4,500 in rent. That amount is set to rise each year to the point that the school would be paying $14,000 a month by the fifth and final year of the agreement.
The school has already spent $17,101 on surveying the Santa Cruz property and another $20,700 on architectural plans, according to purchase orders.
Just moving its portable classrooms there from San Juan Catholic Parish and Santa Fe cost $107,641, documents state. This latter sum included installing the buildings on concrete foundations over the summer, Brennan said. Instead, the portable buildings were only placed there temporarily — the city of Española still hasn’t issued the school a permit to place the classrooms permanently, deputy planning and zoning director Russell Naranjo said. The city had asked the school to present a development plan for the property before issuing it a permit.
“But they just came and asked us, ‘Please, please, can we just park them here in the meantime?’” Naranjo said.
Naranjo said he plans to ask the school in writing within the next month when it plans to remove the vacant, partially-installed buildings from the property. Brennan said he had sincerely thought the buildings were on permanent foundations.
“We rely on the good-faith actions of people, and then I come out looking like a liar. All I can tell you is what people have told me, my engineers,” Brennan said. “When we hired our engineer, they were placed on what we were told were permanent foundations.”
The reasons the school cannot move into the Santa Cruz campus are the same ones that kept the school from moving in this summer. The school must make costly investments to meet state requirements, and that means major expenses lie ahead if it plans to move into the property.
Los Cariños’ Board hired SW Design to conduct a $4,800 traffic study along State Road 76, a requirement from the state Highway Department. The study was put on hold, partly because the school didn’t have the $4,800 to spend, and partly because administrators are concentrating their efforts on getting the school a permanent location on District property, Jaramillo said.
“We’re trying to get one of those free facilities ready,” Jaramillo said. “The preference is to stay where we are, according to (Brennan), and the second is moving into central office. If that doesn’t materialize, we will look further into Santa Cruz.”
Naranjo said having school buses entering and leaving the campus’ small, gravel driveway onto State Road 76 is dangerous and could disrupt traffic, so the state Highway Department would likely not give the school the go-ahead without requiring expensive traffic-control measures, ranging from blinking lights to building an additional turning lane. Department representatives did not return calls.
Complying with state Environment Department requirements could also be costly.
If the school’s enrollment grows from its current 109 students to more than 140, the school will have to install a new septic tank, according to an Aug. 11 letter from Joseph Valdez, a specialist at the Environment Department’s Española office. Los Cariños plans to add a fourth grade next year and a new grade each year thereafter. It currently enrolls students in kindergarten through third grade.
Jaramillo could not provide estimates for how much a new septic tank would cost. Naranjo guessed that installing a new tank and connecting it to eight classrooms could well exceed $50,000, if not $100,000.
“If I were them, I’d just cut my losses and look someplace else,” Naranjo said.
The school’s lease with Chyo does not specify what would happen if Los Cariños attempted to opt out of its lease early. Chyo would not comment for this story.
But the moving mess has happened while Los Cariños is in the middle of a budget crunch. Business Manager Alex Salazar is still working to identify the cause of a $100,000 deficit he identified in the school’s budget in August. Salazar had earlier this school year chalked up most of the deficit then to unpaid federal taxes. He since determined federal and state taxes account for only half the deficit. The rest is likely in small debts owed to miscellaneous contractors he said. For example, the school still owes architects Fanning, Bard and Tatum $8,000 out of the $20,000 it cost to produce plans for the Santa Cruz campus, according to purchase orders.
“It’ll be impossible to know for sure until I go through bank statements for the past two years, item by item,” Salazar said.
The school had initially planned to seek emergency funds from the state Education Department to plug its deficit. It now plans to recover by leaving two vacancies — a teacher and a teacher’s assistant — unfilled, and through additional funding from enrollment growth, Salazar said.