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School board approves PCSD internal audit

Alexandria Gonzalez , The Park Record

Before the Park City Board of Education approved a motion to move forward with the construction of a multi-purpose building on Kearns Boulevard, Superintendent Ember Conley suggested conducting an evaluation of all buildings and facilities in the district.

"My recommendation is that we need to review all facilities with an internal audit," she said at the school board meeting on Tuesday, May 20. "When we look at the timeline, it does not take that long to do, and we have experts and professionals in our district that can perform the audit."

School board president Maurice "Moe" Hickey said it will not cost the district a penny to perform the audit, which will be conducted by the Master Planning Committee. Next Tuesday, the board will reiterate to the community that they will go ahead with the internal audit on all facilities, he said, adding that he hopes to have the results by September.

Jim Fleming and Ed Mulick, co-presidents of the Park City Teachers Association, said Treasure Mountain Junior High has been a concern among community members and district faculty. Hickey said he is expecting the school to be a priority on the list come September after an audit performed by VCBO Architects "a couple years ago" showed most of the district buildings were structurally sound.

"Most of them are structurally in great shape, but the one that has received the most attention from the community is Treasure Mountain," Hickey said. "We really want to look at everything so we can see how different pieces may fit in with other pieces of the needs of the district."

A meeting has been scheduled with the Master Planning Committee for next week, he added, and there will be several more over the summer. The committee is made up of community members, district administration school board members and district staff. For a project this large, Hickey said, the committee may expand.

He defended the board’s decision to move forward with the construction of the multi-purpose building despite the criticisms posed by members of the community and the district. While Knauer said she was uncertain about the uses or the cost of the building, Hickey said those two factors were much more concrete than people may have thought at the meeting on May 20.

"The Park City Center for Advanced Professional Studies will be housed in there for sure, but the superintendent would also like to focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and STEM needs in the district," he said. "And the price tag, according to an original draft from architects, is approximately $5.5 million."

The next step will be to determine which programs will be housed in the building, but Hickey said that will not be discussed until August or September school board meetings when they receive the internal audit report from the Master Planning Committee.

For now, the school board has approved a Request for Proposals on the construction of the building and will hopefully select the bid winners by August in order to start putting together internal structures for the building to be constructed between the Park City Learning Center and Treasure Mountain Junior High School.

"I believe the building will be an integral part of the district moving forward and will grant us a lot of flexibility in the STEM program as well as PCCAPS," Hickey said. "We also specifically picked a location for it that would not interfere with any other developments we may or may not have to do."

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