Local News

Ratnakar buys North School building at auction

ELKINS - The Randolph County Board of Education auctioned off the former North Elementary School building and its property Monday evening to a former Elkins physician who was sentenced to federal prison earlier this year, officials confirmed.

The BOE accepted the auction bid of $638,000 from Dr. Nitesh Ratnakar at a special meeting Monday evening. The name of the bidder was not announced during Monday’s meeting, but Superintendent of Schools Dr. Derek Lambert confirmed to The Inter-Mountain Tuesday that Ratnakar submitted the high bid.

The sale of the building and the property was approved with a 4-1 vote Monday evening. Board of Education members Rachel Burns, Denise Campbell, Peggy Young Ross and Randy Long voted in favor of the sale, while Ed Daniels was opposed.

In March, Ratnakar was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for 41 counts of tax fraud and one count of obstructing a federal grand jury. Officials said he will serve one year of supervised release following his prison sentence.

Ratnakar was indicted by a federal grand jury in February 2024 for failing to pay nearly $2.5 million in payroll taxes. Ratnakar withheld payroll taxes from his employees’ paychecks and failed to make required payments to the IRS.

Ratnakar also filed false tax returns in 2020, 2021, and 2022, and while under investigation, caused false documents to be provided in response to a federal grand jury subpoena.

The Internal Revenue Service was the lead investigator in the case.

Lambert told The Inter-Mountain that the BOE received all the paperwork on the sale of the property Tuesday afternoon, and confirmed that Ratnakar was the winning bidder for the property. 

Asked by The Inter-Mountain Tuesday why the BOE accepted Ratnakar’s bid, Lambert said, "We went with the highest bidder, which we were required to do." He declined to comment further on the situation.

The North Elementary School property online auction was conducted by Kaufman Realty and Auctions. Bidding for the auction started in September and closed on Monday night.

After 50 years as a Randolph County public school, North Elementary was closed along with Harman K-12 School at the end of this past school year in May. The Randolph County BOE voted to close both schools in January due to financial reasons.

The Harman K-12 School building was donated to the Harman Education Association in June. The Harman property disposition allowed the school district to take control of the building after its closure, but the deed stated that the facility must be used for educational purposes if the school closed.

“One thing that we wanted to clarify is the reason we did sell North School at auction versus other properties, is due to the deed and the restrictions in the deeds,” Lambert said during the meeting. “We want to make sure the community knows the difference there between the schools.”

Lambert told The Inter-Mountain on Tuesday that the money from the auction will go into the county’s general fund.

“My goal for that money would be to use it primarily for things that go directly to students,” Lambert said. “We have some projects that have been put off or delayed because we didn’t have the funds. So we are looking at some possibilities that are directly related to students to make some campuses better and some programs better, that we may be potentially able to use some funds to get some grants to match with.”

Kaufman Realty and Auctions’ website currently lists some of the items left over at the school as being up for bid. The auction for those items, which include cooking equipment, desks, shelves, sports equipment, and many more items, will end in six days.

“There are some contents from the building that are still up for bid for a few more days,” Lambert said. “We gave every county school the opportunity to go to North School and put their name, or their school, on anything they wanted. And whatever was not claimed by any of the schools we left there to go to auction.”