By DONALD WITTKOWSKI
Visitors to Sea Isle City’s former public school are greeted by locked doors and a sign at the front entrance that bluntly says, “This building is closed to the public.”
Chances are it will remain closed to the public – forever.
Sea Isle officials said the building’s heating system is broken and the running water has been turned off. There is no plan to have the heating system repaired while discussions continue to demolish the school and redevelop the site at 4501 Park Road into a new community recreation center.
“With our HVAC system on the fritz, we don’t want to put several hundred thousand dollars in that (building) if we’re going to be tearing it down in several months to proceed with a new facility,” City Business Administrator George Savastano said.
Savastano spoke during a town hall meeting Saturday focusing on the city’s plan to build a $20 million community center on the block of property now occupied by the old school.
Assuming the community center project is given final approval by City Council, construction is expected to start next summer and would take about 15 to 18 months to complete.
Some local residents suggested during the town hall meeting that the city should reopen the old school to let the public use the gymnasium for recreation until construction starts on the community center.
City officials, though, have no interest in reopening a building in the dead of winter that has no heat or running water, they said.
Already, they have cancelled the city’s family-friendly New Year’s Eve celebration held each year in the old school’s gymnasium.
Built in 1971, the former school once housed students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. A phased closing began in 2010, when students in grades fifth through eighth were transferred to the Ocean City school district.
By 2012, all of the remaining students in the lower grades were transferred to Ocean City. In June 2012, the school was closed. The city’s declining school population was too small to justify keeping the school in operation.
However, the school didn’t remain as dead space. After flooding from Hurricane Sandy damaged the old City Hall in 2012, the school served as a temporary headquarters for the municipal government and police department. The school building continued in that role until the new $11.7 million City Hall opened in 2015 on John F. Kennedy Boulevard.
The school occupies an entire block bordered by Park Road, Central Avenue, 45th Street and 46th Street. Such a large chunk of property would provide the footprint for the proposed community center.
After the school was closed in 2012, the school district sold the building to the city for the nominal fee of $1, Board of Education President Dan Tumolo said during the town hall meeting.
The school property is zoned for administrative and public use, which prohibits commercial development, condominiums or other housing projects from being built there, Tumolo said in an earlier interview.
In recent years, the city’s Recreation Department used the school building for office space. The Board of Education held its public meetings in the old school and also had office space there.
The city also had used the building for storage space. Before the building was closed to the public, the gymnasium was opened up for basketball games.
Now, the building sits empty. Its boxy, low-slung design gives it an institutional look. Exterior walls streaked with grime and broken window fittings add to the building’s stark appearance. The words “Public School” have been removed from the front entrance.
A community survey conducted by the city in 2015 asked the public for suggestions on what should be done with the old school. The highest number of respondents, or 36 percent, proposed having the building redeveloped as a park or recreation site. The second-highest response was to use the property as a parking lot.
Before Mayor Leonard Desiderio and his administration decided to build a brand new community center, city officials had discussed the possibility of converting the old school into a recreation and community complex.
Savastano explained at the town hall meeting that it would not be feasible to renovate the old school.
The city would be “very limited” in what it could do to renovate the building because it does not meet modern flood standards and would have to be elevated to comply with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s stormwater regulations, he said.
In the meantime, the old school remains in “a holding pattern” before it is torn down, Savastano added.
