File photo Randolph County Board of Education members, from left, Rachel Burns, Phil Chua and Sherri Collett listen during a previous BOE meeting in Elkins.

ELKINS — Randolph County Schools Superintendent Dr. Shawn Dilly recently discussed potential plans for North Elementary and the Harman K-12 School properties after both schools close at the end of this school year.

In October, the Randolph County Board of Education voted 4-1 to close Harman, and 5-0 to close North. At Tuesday’s BOE meeting, Dilly presented the Board with a handout that highlighted some initial plans for the properties.

“The highlighted properties are the ones that would be being looked at and they are the North School properties and the Harman School properties,” Dilly told the BOE as they looked over the material. “I do have this currently being looked at by the legal teams just to make sure, because we know some of these properties may have some restrictions on them, so we want to make sure we are doing everything the proper way as we get ready to prepare towards probably most likely looking to move to an auction.”

Dilly told the Board that it would have three primary options when deciding what to do with the properties.

“Obviously you have the option to sell the properties, lease the properties, or transfer or conveyance to a public entity, so a non-profit or some of those who are eligible under policy 8200 under the state provisions,” Dilly said.

He said one of the areas he wanted to highlight and follow up on in the next two months was what direction the district and the board was going to take with the Harman School Library.

“If the community is not interested in the actual Harman School, we could be working with the library to perhaps make that the hub for the virtual school opportunity as well,”: Dilly said. “So that is something I’m hoping we can have conversations on moving forward.

“If the school is in turn sold, we would have some contingency plans in place with the library and some other options or other community elements there. I do have a person that works for the school up there (Harman) that’s interested in working with us to try and help facilitate some of this. I’m going to rely a lot on their community expertise to help guide us through some of these steps as we go forward.”

Dilly said later in the meeting that moving forward with a virtual school option was going to be determined by the number of participants.

“Virtual school, I think it comes down to really at this point the key piece is going to be determining the numbers of actual participants,” Dilly said. “And this is where we want to do some follow-up surveys. We know if we try to do it now, they are not thinking that far ahead, so we know we are going to have to wait until later in the spring to determine what actual numbers of participation we’ll see from the different regions.

“I know we have been looking at the homeschool and hope scholarship recipients, but we also know we want to try and target specifically the Harman community with a separate survey so we can try and determine what amount of support, because obviously if we have 10 kids versus 75 kids, that’s going to require very different levels of support.”

Dilly proposed using North Elementary School as a hub to store all the equipment and items from the closed schools and would like to hire an auction company to help distribute the items.

“We know we are going to have to basically bolster our handyman crew during this process so we can address all the movement of our products and things so that we can get all of the equipment and things moved around throughout the summer and probably even beginning prior to the process,” Dilly said.

“We are planning on using North School as a hub or reservoir for the equipment and different things and then working with an auction company that way we can get the exposure online and do a national availability of those items to put out there. We know we have some equipment from the CTE center, some buses, and a variety of other items that we are wanting to put up for auction along with these pieces of property that we can auction at the same time.”

Dilly told the BOE that there would be an additional cost in hiring an auctioneer, but that the exposure an auctioneer would bring would pay for itself.

“How I’ve done this in another district is we basically brought all of the stuff and warehoused it at one location, made it available for staff to come and see if there were any items they wanted to keep and take to their classrooms,” Dilly said.

“We had a process for getting that delivered to their classrooms prior to the actual auction items going out for finalizing. So we want to make sure we are not losing any equipment, any chairs, desks, or something like that that can be used in other classrooms.”

Dilly said there will be many items throughout the facilities that will also have to be moved.

“Technologies has already done a preliminary review and completed that and they are prepared to work that out in facilitation of moving the different technology pieces,” Dilly said. “So I know there’s a plan in place there and we are getting a lot of things prepped. But we can’t do anything until kids and staff are out of the building. So that is going to be some of the things that will take place very quickly once we get things in place.”

The next Randolph County Board of Education meeting will be Jan. 20, beginning at 5:30 p.m. at the BOE Office in Elkins.