The Manassas School Board and City Council will hold a joint meeting on Thursday, November 30. The governing bodies are expected to receive updates on several capital projects, including the planned construction of the replacement of Jennie Dean Elementary School.
Officials will receive a report from RRMM Architects, presenting new information about the site and design of the school, which is expected to cost at least $87 million and sit in the heart of Jennie Dean Park. According to public documents, the two-story school will hold about 1,000 students and feature an IT workworm, a broadcast booth, and collaborative learning areas.
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Insidenova.com: “Manassas City Public Schools have settled on a design for the new Jennie Dean Elementary School, with plans to break ground at the start of 2025.”
“On Tuesday, School Board Chair Suzanne Seaberg announced that the division had selected Arlington-based RRMM Architects for the project. The company will use a prototype design used for Hardy Elementary School in Smithfield.”
During a Manassas City Council meeting on Monday, March 27, we learned Councilman Tom Osina pulled his proposal to fund the city schools categorically.
Osina issued the proposal, threatening to withhold funding from the city's public schools if it did not come forward with plans to rebuild the 60-year-old elementary school, at 9061 Dean Lane, by July 2024.
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The Manassas School Board will meet on Tuesday, March 14, to discuss the replacement of Jennie Dean Elementary School.
The school replacement has been a point of contention between the city council, which raised taxes to fund a new school several years ago only to find construction has yet to begin.
City council members made their frustrations known during a joint meeting in late 2022 and again this year when considering adjusting the school board’s budget to allow it to purchase the city’s largest office building at 8700 Centreville Road.
A proposal from one council member threatens that if the city council adjusts the school division budget and doesn’t present a clear plan to build a new Jennie Dean Elementary School, the city will enact control over the school division’s budget.
School boards in Virginia do not have the power to levy taxes.
The city council is expected to vote on the measure on March 27.
Meanwhile, the Manassas City School Board will meet Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Jennie Dean Elementary school, 9601 Prince William Street in Manassas. The meeintg is open to the public, and you can watch a meeting live stream.
The school was opened in the late 1950s.
The latest plans for a replacement of Jennie Dean Elementary School feature another pre-kindergarten to fourth-grade elementary school built with the same layout as Baldwin Intermediate and Elementary School, which opened in 2016.
The Manassas City Council took no action on the proposed purchase of the largest office building in the city during its meeting Monday, February 27, 2023.
The Manassas City School Board is asking the city council to allow it to spend nearly $11 million on the largest office building in Manassas.
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Elected officials in Manassas had it out last night over efforts to build a replacement for Dean Elementary School and the school board's request to buy the largest office building in the city.
At issue is the school board's request of the city council, which funds the public schools, to reallocate $11.5 million of its budget so it can purchase 8700 Centreville Road, a four-story office building in the city's most densely-populated commercial corridor. The school division already rents space in the 33-year-old, four-story building.
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[Updated 4:38 p.m.] Manassas School officials will hear from the public about a $78 million capital improvement plan that includes a new elementary school, relocating the division's central office, and upgrading to multiple school buildings.
Topping the school division's five-year capital improvement plan is the much-talked-about replacement for the 71-year-old Jennie Dean Elementary School. The new school will cost $62 million and will be located near the existing school, on the ground of Jennie Dean Park.
A groundbreaking has yet to be scheduled for the new school. The city faces a shortage of buildable land, and officials have long talked about building the replacement school on city-owned parkland.
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Manassas needs a new Jennie Dean Elementary School; City Council and School Board at odds on funding it
MANASSAS — Jennie Dean Elementary School is 82 years old and not getting any younger.
With aging infrastructure requiring frequent repairs and a rapidly increasing student body, Manassas’ City Council and School Board are struggling to reach a funding agreement for a new school.
The cost of tearing down the old school at the intersection of Wellington Road and Prince William Street in Manassas and constructing a new, expanded building on the land requires roughly $30 million — a tall order for a city with one of the highest tax rates in the state.
“The building is old, children deserve a better building than that,” School Board member Tim Demeria told Potomac Local.
Several studies have concluded that the building’s age and limited capacity would make renovation ineffective in the long term, according to Almeta Radford, director of public communications for Manassas City Public Schools. The school “is past its useful life and should be replaced,” she said.
In 2015 the School Board hired Citigate GIS, a consulting firm, to determine the needs of the school division through 2030 and they found that replacing Dean Elementary with a “Dean Intermediate School” of approximately 140,000 feet would yield the best results.
Radford said that waiting will only compound the situation.
“The cost to replace Jennie Dean will never be cheaper than right now,” she said. “The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be and the more costly the repairs will be to maintain an outdated Dean.”
The other pressing issue is the size of the student body, which has followed a consistent trend of yearly increase.
“Manassas City Public Schools student enrollment has continued to increase at a rate of approximately 1.5% annually and is projected to do so for the foreseeable future,” Radford noted. “Student enrollment growth is primarily in the elementary grade levels.”
If that population trend continues, students will need to be placed in trailer classrooms. Demeria sees that happening within the next two to three years.
“But we don’t want to do that,” Demeria added. “Trailers become an added expense of their own. Would we rather spend money on trailers or on a new building?”
In addition to the expense, trailers come with a host of other issues that impact student life. They typically do not include bathrooms, and they take up space on school grounds otherwise used for practice areas and extracurricular activities Security procedures to get students back and forth from the main building to trailers are also an issue, officials say.
The City Council and School Board Finance Committees have been meeting since May 2018 to establish a new funding agreement for the School Board, covering the replacement of Dean Elementary.
December 10th’s school funding proposal — which would have continued an annual 2.56 percent funding increase yearly over the next three years — was struck down in a 4 to 2 vote.
As of now, the City is still working on a funding agreement with the School Board, but if the Council comes back with a number the School Board deems insufficient, they will not be able to move forward.
In addition to the school situation, the Council must also think about funds for things like fire and rescue services and street upkeep. Manassas’ increasing tax rate is also a source of concern for some councilmembers.
Some proposals have included stipulations on where the money goes to, but Demeria said these are frustrating to the School Board.
In one of the previous funding drafts, funds were compartmentalized to go to other areas, such as debt service. “I had a problem with that,” he said. “The City Council needs to allocate a lump sum and allow the elected School Board to do our job.”
“We are both elected officials,” Demeria said. “We’re elected to run the schools, they’re elected to fund the schools. They need to do their job and allow us to do our job.”
Demeria said that the School Board has been very fiscally responsible over the years, despite challenges. “When I started on the Board twelve years ago, we received more money from the City per student than we do today,” he noted.
The Board has had an average increase of one and a half percent per year, and with that increase, “we’ve built Mayfield [Intermediate School], built Baldwin [Elementary and Intermediate schools], added on to Haydon [Elementary school], built Gillum Fields, maintained all of our schools and buses, brought our teacher salaries up to par with Prince William County — all on a percent and a half per year.” “We’ve been very fiscally responsible and we should be treated that way and allowed to make the decisions that are in the best interests of our children,” he said.
The School Board has provided revenue estimates for the foreseeable future to City Council for review and is working with the City Manager to determine tax consequences.
