Seismic upgrades planned

Five of Charleston's downtown schools and Sullivan's Island Elementary School would be the first to receive seismic upgrades under a plan that is slowly being crafted by Charleston County School District.

The school board earlier this week decided unanimously to create a fund dedicated to requesting engineering reports and future design plans for these buildings, which include Buist Academy, Charleston Progressive Academy, James Simons Elementary School, Memminger Elementary School and the former Rivers Middle School buildings.

The board agreed to put $7.5 million leftover from previous building projects into the account, the first step to making the seismic repairs a reality. These schools are considered the most vulnerable in the county to collapse should an earthquake strike.

The need for the repairs has been a controversial, much-debated issue for the past couple of years. The school district commissioned an engineering report on the former Rivers Middle building more than two years ago that showed it would fail in an earthquake, and school officials said the vacant building couldn't be renovated unless they made repairs to make it safe.

Supporters of the Charleston Charter School for Math & Science saw the report as an effort to prevent the charter school from using the building. The charter school, which opened this fall, is housed in temporary mobile units on the Rivers campus.

Charter school backers, including its board president Park Dougherty and county school board member Arthur Ravenel Jr., fought for months against doing the renovations, but they've now changed their minds and gotten behind the effort to move forward with the seismic upgrades.

"The Rivers building has been effectively condemned, and the only way to bring it out from its condemnation is to address the seismic concerns about the impact of an earthquake," Dougherty said. "We lost the argument, and we're moving on to the next issue. Our focus is to make sure the work that is done is cost-effective."

Dougherty is worried about the expensive estimates he's seen for the work and that the cost will prolong the amount of time it takes to complete the work or prohibit the work from ever being finished. Neither of those options fall in line with his goal of moving the school into the Rivers building.

Bill Lewis, executive director of the district's building program, said the next step is to study the six buildings and their ability to support varying program needs in the future. That evaluation should tell officials whether it makes sense to renovate the schools or build new ones, he said.

"If we're going to make a 50-year investment, does it serve us well over the next 50 years or are we throwing a lot of money at an old building?" Lewis said.

He hopes to return to the board with more information by mid-summer, and he said officials then would involve the city, as well as each school's community, in the process.

School leaders likely will face some resistance from the preservation community, especially if they decide that rebuilding schools would be better than renovating them. Cynthia Jenkins, executive director of the Preservation Society of Charleston, said she didn't want to see the district take a "throw-away attitude" with its historic school buildings because they often are built better than new ones. Jenkins wasn't convinced that the district should be spending millions of dollars to seismically retrofit a building when there's no guarantee that the improvements will work, and she said different engineers will make vastly different assessments of buildings for seismic work.

Board Chairwoman Toya Green said ideally she sees the school district working with all its stakeholders to agree on whoever would perform the engineering reports. Addressing the buildings' seismic needs is a high priority, she said.

"I want the kids to be safe," she said.

Reach Diette Courrégé at 937-5546 or dcourrege@postandcourier.com.