E-mail Story
Print Friendly
Send E-mail
Reprint story
Saturday, October 24, 2009
APS Eyes Downtown Church Site
By Hailey Heinz
Journal Staff Writer
Albuquerque Public Schools has put in a bid to purchase the First Baptist Church site, which has been part of the proposal for a Downtown event center.
Superintendent Winston Brooks said if the purchase goes through, the site at Broadway and Central will be used as a magnet school for the arts. The bid, for $8 million or an appraisal of the property, whichever is lower, is contingent on voter approval during the February bond package.
Brooks said he sees magnet schools as key to improving the district.
"I'm convinced one of the reasons the charter school movement became such a force here in New Mexico is districts didn't provide parents very much choice," he said. He also said the arts are key to boosting graduation rates.
City leaders have been considering a Downtown event center and hotel for years, but the plan has stalled over how to pay for it. City councilors who championed an event center said the bid would complicate their plan but not stop it.
APS Chief Operations Officer Brad Winter said the site provides "an exciting building."
Winter said APS would keep the historic building largely as is, and remodeling it would cost far less than building a new school. He said the cost would be "very minimal."
"The site, besides being centrally located, is almost built like a school already," Winter said. "It has 40 working classrooms, and the sanctuary would be a great place for the performing arts center."
Brooks said he envisions the school as a K-8 magnet, which might share the site with the Public Academy for the Performing Arts charter school. PAPA, a middle and high school, is currently housed in portables and has asked the district for a permanent campus. Brooks said the schools could share space and create a fine arts track, beginning with the magnet and leading to high school at PAPA.
"I was actually shocked when I first came to Albuquerque that here in the Southwest where the arts are such a huge part of our culture, that there wasn't a fine arts magnet," he said.
He defended the decision to propose buying the building, despite APS' budget woes.
"Everything that we are doing to try to improve APS is going to cost money," he said. "It's going to be about spending money on things that we think work and quit spending money on things that there's no evidence are working."
Winter said APS would be open to sharing parking space with a future event center, but Councilor Debbie O'Malley said the APS bid presents another roadblock.
"I'm a little surprised in some ways that they've made an offer because I thought they had alternate sites for this," O'Malley said. "They own a lot of land already ... and they have a lot of buildings with classrooms, too."
She added, though, that she doesn't think the bid would kill the event center.
"It certainly complicates things, but I'm pretty optimistic about us taking something to the voters that will make sense," she said.
You also can send comments via our comment form
|
|
