- November 17, 2024
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In less than a year, the shouts of schoolchildren at play may ring out from the old county courthouse as the historic structure, vacant since 2006, becomes the new home of a Christian school that has outgrown its current campus.
The County Commission voted 3-1 at a Tuesday morning special meeting to approve up to $375,000 to renovate the building and award a bid to lease it to First Baptist Christian Academy, a pre-K-12 school now run at the First Baptist Church at 6052 Palm Coast Parkway NW. Commissioner Nate McLaughlin cast the dissenting vote, saying he did not support the county sinking any more money into the building; Commissioner Charlie Ericksen missed the meeting for health reasons.
First Baptist Church Pastor and Christian Academy Principal Kevin Lautar said the school has had to turn away “a couple of dozen students this year alone” because of space constraints, and called the commission’s vote in favor of the school “the last hurdle that we were waiting to clear to go full steam ahead.”
The church’s bid was one of two that passed basic requirements of the county’s request for proposal, and was the one recommended for approval by county staff. The other was submitted by the ExecData Inc. Information Technology Development Center.
County Administrator Craig Coffey presented the case in favor of the school to county commissioners at the meeting.
“We’ve gotten two submittals. Both proposals were very good, but there were some distinct differences we felt warranted one over the other,” he said.
He listed seven reasons to favor the Christian school over ExecData: The school promised a larger initial investment up front, relied less on grant money and the possibility of renting out space, had more established funding sources, was an established organization while ExecData was a start-up, would pay monthly rent while ExecData would not, seemed to have a better understanding of the courthouse building’s issues and history, and had more experience maintaining large facilities.
Deputy County Administrator Sally Sherman also visited the school Tuesday morning to review its funding sources, and found its proposal fiscally sound.
“They opened their books to me,” she said to commissioners during the meeting. “They have more than enough funds to move this project forward.”
The school charges tuition at a rate of $5,000 per student per year — it now has 211 students, but plans to enroll at least 300 this coming year — and has lined up private donors and promissory notes to finance the move to the courthouse.
Under the proposal approved Tuesday, the county’s $375,000 would pay for work that would be needed regardless of who rents the space — like maintaining the HVAC system, the roof and the elevators, and continuing termite control — and the school will invest up to $500,000 in renovations specific to its purposes, including converting space in the courtroom annex to about 35 classrooms and adding a cafeteria and a fenced playground behind the building.
The school would also pay about $3,000 in rent and cam charges initially, then about $6,000 a month starting Aug. 1. Ultimately, Coffey said, the school would pay the county more than the $375,000 the county would invest to repair he building.
That return swayed Commissioner Frank Meeker — who’d been wary of efforts to find a new use for the courthouse after the Bunnell City Commission, after asking for it for years, rejected it and returned it to the county — to favor the school’s proposal. He ran the numbers, he said, and found that the school would ultimately pay the county about $424,800.
“The public’s money is going into an investment over the next 30 years, and it’s going to make a return on that investment of about $50,000,” he said.
The county would also no longer pay about $70,000 per year to maintain the building.
“This takes away the expense that we’ve been having annually, and has income in its place, and sets aside money so that we have a better building,” Commissioner Barbara Revels said. “The beauty of it is, if it’s 10 years, that we as a county may need that space by then, and it may be returned to us in some decent and operable condition.”
But Douglas Courtney, the architect behind the ExecData proposal, said during public comment that he’d submitted his proposal under the impression that the county was not willing to put any money into the building.
“We were told there was no money available,” he said. “We would have loved to have found out through the RFP that there was another $375,000 available in grants through the county.”
Courtney said that while he wanted to see the building used, he was “torn” over the idea of the county sinking so much tax money into it.
“I think the $375,000 should be used… for the benefit of the entire county, not for this entity,” he said.
County attorney Al Hadeed said after the meeting that he had analyzed what the ExecData proposal would have looked like with a $375,000 county investment, and found it still financially inferior to the Christian school’s proposal.
Constitutionality concerns
By the time the commission met Tuesday, Americans United for Separation of Church and State board of trustees president and former Temple Beth Shalom Rabbi Merrill Shapiro had read a FlaglerLive.com news story about the school’s bid for the property and emailed commissioners Monday evening urging them to “think twice about subsidizing sectarian schools.”
Commissioner George Hanns asked during the meeting if enrollment is open to all children or just church members. County administrator Craig Coffey replied that he did not know, but that the county has rented space to religious organizations in the past.
“Some folks have talked about religious, how can we rent a facility to a religious-affiliated institution,” Coffey said. “The reality is we rent pavilions to all types of groups; we rent community centers to all types of groups. If you think about this facility, the School Board actually had church services here for about two or three years … You can’t show favoritism, but you can’t discriminate against them because they’re religious, either. So you have to treat them equal, and that’s what we’ve done.”
The school does allow non-church members to attend, Lautar said in an interview Monday. “We have Catholics, Methodists, and people who don’t really have an affiliation at all,” he said. “We already minister to people across the spectrum, so to speak.” Lautar also told the commission during public comment Tuesday that the school does not restrict admission to church members.
But the school does follow the A Beka Book Christian curriculum — whose texts have come under fire for teaching young-earth creationism instead of evolution and for what critics have called dismissive treatment of other faiths — and requires potential staff members to affirm a belief in Christianity through a “statement of faith” Lautar described as “basically a core set of Christian doctrines, that what the Bible says is true, is true — it’s basically a statement of basic Christian beliefs.” An employment application posted on the academy’s website asks potential applicants to “Give three references that are qualified to speak of your spiritual experience and Christian service” and tells them to “List your current pastor first.”
Shapiro said the church-state conflict created by the county’s relationship with the Christian school extends beyond favoritism.
“It isn’t a question of preferential treatment; it’s a question of the government doing business with religious organizations,” he said in an interview after the vote Tuesday.
“This is an organization that discriminates in hiring on the basis of religion,” he said. “I don’t think the county should support organizations that discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion. I suspect that if they discriminated in hiring on the basis of race… would the county want to associate itself with that organization? I doubt it.”
County Attorney Al Hadeed said after the meeting that he didn’t know the details of the school’s hiring practices, or whether the county could find itself liable if someone took legal action claiming the school had refused to hire them because they were nonreligious, gay, or Jewish.
“That will definitely be a focus of my inquiry in aiding in preparing the lease agreement,” he said.
But Hadeed said he’d analyzed the aspect of the academy’s bid that required the county to invest money into the building up front, and found that it did not violate consititutionally-mandated separation of church and state: The money the county puts into the facility, he said, will return to the county, and the improvements the money funds would be necessary for the building’s “market value, its utility and its future use” regardless of the building’s tenant.
“There is no improper subsidy to a faith-based organization,” Hadeed said. “If we gave them a special discount, then we’d definitely have a problem. … But the fact that they’re paying all the (common area maintenance) charges through the formula that was devised again establishes that there was no subsidy to the church.”
Hadeed also noted that Lautar had told the commission, in reply to a question by Hanns, that the school’s enrollment was not restricted to church members.
“The pastor said that it was open enrollment, that you were not required to be a member of the church. If the response were different, my opinion might be different,” he said.
But Shapiro said curricula used in Christian schools are often exclusionary.
“The government giving the stamp of approval to a religious organization is troublesome,” he said. “I don’t think the government should be supporting a message that opposes other people’s religious beliefs.”
Plans for expansion and ‘a blessing to the community’
The courthouse won't just give the First Baptist Christian Academy more space, Lautar said. It will also give the school a chance for accreditation through the Florida Association of Christian Colleges and Schools — something particularly important now that the school has, just this year, begun accepting high school students.
“We are in the process of going through accreditation, but there is a certain square footage that we have to have per student to be accredited,” he said. “We will never be accredited where we’re at, because the square footage is too small.”
Of the school’s 211 students, Lautar said, 43 are in middle or high school, and accreditation will help their college prospects. He expects a projected total school enrollment of 300 for the coming school year to include some students from out of town.
“People who are looking for a private education, a Christian education, would drive regionally for that,” he said. “We feel that the middle and high school classes will really help fulfill a growing need for parents who desire a private education for their children.” Lautar expects that the school may one day outgrow the courthouse property.
But for now, he said, the courthouse building — through its size, historic nature and it central location in Bunnell — will give the church and its academy a chance to have a greater impact on the community.
“The courthouse is very special to a lot of people,” he said. “It holds a lot of significance, really, in the heart of the community, and we want to be involved in a way that helps perpetuate that and really carry on. We’re looking for it to be a blessing to the community.”
