By JIM BUTLER
If any bids are received Thursday for purchase of closed North Bayou Rapides Elementary the School Board can only hope they are at or above appraised value.
That has been a prerequisite for sale of public property since the days of some dirty deeds done dirt cheap came to an end with state law.
Chief Finance Officer Elizabeth Dolemite held out hope at the recent Finance Committee meeting that one or more bids would be offered.
That optimism was in the wake of no expressions of interest at a facility view and walkthrough. No potential bidders surfaced.
The facility has been closed two years, taken offline with a change in the District 62 feeder schools system.
One drawback for bidders could be the plant’s age as it dates to the period of asbestos-containing building materials, a high-cost remediation project.
Regardless the bid outcome, Dolemite told the committee the next steps are to remove and take care of reusable equipment and materials stored there. Where to move them is the question.
The building and contents, like any structure idle for some time, can become tempting targets of would-be thieves or vandals just on a destroying mission.
One such vandalism incident occurred in June of this year. If the miscreants were tracked down their arrests went unnoticed.
As recently as 2019 the school received a gift of 1,000 new Disney books from ABC 31.
(Please not a bonfire, Messers Landry and Desantis). Ok, bad line.
The building is just down the road toward town from Melady House, one of the parish’s most stately manses, scene of any number of special functions each year.
While it didn’t close until 2021, the school’s fate was likely sealed decades earlier.
In 1980 North Bayou, then a semi-rural school with about 800 students, was paired with six schools in Alexandria proper to create a more racially-mixed system, including creation of 6th Grade centers in the inner city. Flight began.
Flight of a different kind ended in the early 1990s when England AFB closed, taking with it those kids whose parents lived near and worked on the base, as well as some military dependents whose children attended.
Contact Jim at jimbutler76@gmail.com