The Fayette County Board of Education has voted to move the school district’s central office from its current headquarters on Main Street to an office building owned by Lexmark.
The board unanimously authorized the purchase of a 187,000-square-foot office building from Lexmark for $10 million. Located at 450 Park Place on the Russell Cave Road side of the Lexmark campus, the building has been vacant since 2013. The cost of renovating the existing central office at 701 E. Main St. would top $27 million. Constructing a comparable office building would be more than $46.6 million.
The purchase will not be final until after the district completes several due diligence steps and receives final approval from the Kentucky Department of Education. The Lexmark building was built in 2002 and will not require renovation. Separating the utilities from the rest of the Lexmark campus will require about $3.5 million in construction work, making the total project cost $13.5 million.
If the project receives KDE approval, the 93-year-old 701 E. Main St. building, which formerly housed Henry Clay High School, would go back into district inventory and would be available to house an academic program.
“After 39 years, the building is not a functional office space,” Caulk said. “But I have no doubt the legacy of excellence established in these halls in 1926 will continue for decades into the future.”
After the current Henry Clay High School opened in 1971, the building on East Main was renovated to house the district’s central office administrative functions. It has not been updated since 1980, and is shown on the district’s facilities plan for a major renovation. All schools in the district have either been renovated or replaced more recently, or are in the process of being renovated or replaced.
The main street building includes an auditorium with seating for 750, but meeting space is sparse and offices are hard to find because many corridors do not connect from one area to the other. Parking at the location is also a challenge for the public.
The Lexmark building is very close to the FCPS warehouse at 1126 Russell Cave Rd. and would lend itself to consolidation of additional district support functions. The East Main site is divided into four separate buildings that together total 145,000 square feet on three acres. By comparison, the Lexmark building is 187,000 on 10 acres. The current central office has 123 parking spaces; the proposed new one has 400.
The district’s current facilities plan calls for two new elementary schools, a new middle school, and a building for STEAM Academy. The plan also calls for major renovations of 17 facilities, including the expansion of the district’s technical centers, and wholesale renovations at Henry Clay, Lafayette, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Tates Creek high schools and three middle schools.
The $23 million Brenda Cowan Elementary will open in the fall of 2019, renovations will begin in June on a $26.8 million permanent home for STEAM, and the district is amending its facilities plan to build a new $77 million Tates Creek High School because that will be more cost effective than renovating the existing structure.