Rendon pushes for earlier dates.
At the June 24 Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS) School Board Workshop, part of the agenda addressed how to manage building new schools to meet the needs of the burgeoning population growth of Hillsborough County. The booming areas are the southern part of the county and Plant City.
HCPS has been putting together data-driven projections to plan for school construction to meet the need to provide more classroom seats.
A page from the school board meeting documents states, “Hillsborough County Public Schools is addressing rapid population growth and rising living costs through coordinated long-range planning, real estate optimization….Current projections show a significant school capacity shortfall in the southern region and the Plant City area over the next 15 years. Meanwhile, rising construction costs, interest rates, and land-use constraints limit HCPS’s ability to meet these demands without proactive planning and partnerships.”
To come up with this projection, HCPS uses a formula to determine what they call “student generation rate.” The formulas figure the average number of students living in a particular type of residential unit, such as single-family attached, or mobile home. It takes that percentage to project growth in the number of students. For example, according to the projection formula, 100 single family homes would yield 20 elementary school students, nine middle school students, and 14 high school students, for a total of 43 students.
Including single-family, attached, and multi-family construction projects, Plant City has 9,409 dwelling units recently completed or on the way in the next few years. According to the formula, this will bring 1,398 elementary, 649 middle, and 905 high school students to Plant City.
To get ahead of this growth, in the summer of 2024, HCPS bought 23 acres near the intersection of N. Park Road and E. Sam Allen Road to build a new high school. The parcels are across E. Sam Allen Road from the new South Florida Baptist Hospital. HCPS also purchased 46 acres about two miles away at the southwest corner of the intersection of Charlie Taylor Road and Midway Road to build an elementary school and a middle school.
In 2022, voters elected Patti Rendon to the HCPS board representing District 4, which is responsible for overseeing 50 schools in east county, south county, and the area between. She is one of seven members of the board who vote on the policies of HCPS. “We want good schools for Plant City,” she said. “We have to take care of the residents of Plant City and make sure we have proper places for education of students. I am doing everything I can to work with the administrators of all of our schools to elevate the opportunities for our students in Plant City.”
Now comes the issue. Last year, county voters elected to renew, for 15 years, the Community Investment Tax (CIT), a half-cent per dollar sales tax. For the past 30 years, HCPS has gotten 25 percent of CIT funds. After vigorous debates, county commissioners voted to allocate five percent of CIT to schools.
“This is not a county commission issue,” Rendon said. “If you go back and look at the documentation that was provided to the county commission from HCPS, they did not provide a full accounting of all the needs for growth for the next 10 years. If they would have been given information for all of the structural needs of the community, I believe they could have made a different decision. That is why it was very important the county commission made the CIT only about new builds, because it made sure that five percent went only into the growth of the county, so it helped us in Plant City, and also Wimauma. But what we really needed was 12 percent to answer the growth.”
This CIT deficit, and HCPS’s mindset not to add to its debt, generated one timeline from the workshop materials showing HCPS could delay the opening of the Plant City elementary school until 2034, and the high school until 2039. But this isn’t good enough for Rendon. “I would like to see us break ground on an elementary school and a high school,” she said. “Focus is on the high school first see breto break ground in the next three years. We need to be in these schools by 2028 and 2030 at the very latest. If I could get it sooner, I would. At the end of the day, I want to make sure that the money we are using is going to the student stations where we have existing students that need services. We need to allocate money from our capital funding to make sure we are directly impacting our student stations. We know out of all the new growth, south county and Plant City is where the growth is. That is where the new student stations are necessary. I want to make sure we are focusing on where we have the need.”
Rendon is looking for ways to use HCPS funding more efficiently. Schools with low student populations still incur the overhead to run the school. She has asked for a per student cost of every school in the district to get insights into where money could be saved. “Looking at the district as a whole, we have to ask, how are we running our district?” she commented. “How are we managing our schools? How are we managing the outlay of our funds to make sure that we are providing the right allocation? We are going to have to make better decisions. I need these opportunities for these students in Plant City. I need to give these students a proper education. There are other ways we can look at capital funding to be able to build the schools, but we have to look at everything as a global ask.” In addition to financial efficiency to save dollars to build the schools in Plant City, additional options are cash funding, financing debt, certificates of participation, or lease to purchase agreements.
“I am going to continue to advocate those areas become a priority where the district is putting their growth funding,” Rendon said. “At the same time, I want to make sure we are putting financial resources into schools that need them. I want to continue making sure the area of Plant City gets the resources it needs to maintain every one of our student stations.” Her attention shows in this summer’s installation of a new HVAC system at Turkey Creek Middle School, and complete outside refreshes at Plant City High School and Lincoln Elementary. Her determination could pay off in opening teh new schools in time to keep Plant City schools from overcrowding.
