The proposed closures of four Houston elementary schools could leave those neighborhoods with more eyesores and create safe havens for illegal activity, some neighbors have said -- but school district administrators said they’re taking steps to prevent that from happening.

As Houston Independent School District trustees consider closing four elementary schools, community members are reminding them of the forlorn condition of another campus, the old Bastian Elementary building on Calhoun Road.

"The fact that an unoccupied, unused, raggedy, unmonitored, closed school … sits within 1.3 miles of Grimes Elementary School and only 3 miles away from Rhoads Elementary School is very unsettling," Tristan Washington told HISD Superintendent Terry Grier and trustees in an e-mail. "We don’t need another school closure which results in another 'old Bastian Elementary' situation."

Washington is a deacon at the Berean Missionary Baptist Church, about a mile down the road from Rhoads, which faces possible closure along with Grimes, Stevenson and McDade elementaries. 

HISD’s chief operating officer, Leo Bobadilla, said he has “heard those concerns, too.”

“The last thing we want is an eyesore in the neighborhood,” he said. “We want to be a good neighbor in the community.”

The old Bastian building was left vacant in 2007 when HISD built the new Bastian Elementary on Bellfort Avenue in Sunnyside. The new school was financed by bonds approved by voters in 2002, according to HISD’s website, and it combined students from the old Bastian building and Thornton Fairchild Elementary.

HISD still owns the building and the land that the old elementary school occupies, said Issa Dadoush, the district’s general manager of construction and facilities. It was put up for sale a couple of years ago, but the district did not receive any offers on it, Dadoush said. (View video of the old Bastian site in a YouTube clip Sunnyside community members created recently.)

The land and buildings are appraised at $2.2 million for tax purposes, according to the Harris County Appraisal District’s Web site this week -- $1.3 million for the buildings and $900,000 for the land. At one point, the property was listed for sale for $825,000, according to an online multiple listings service search, or slightly more than a third of the county’s appraised value for it. (“6-acre tract of land located in Southeast Houston,” the listing said. “Ideally located for redevelopment as a part of the Southeast/Hwy 610 South Corridor.”)

To make it more attractive to possible buyers, HISD plans to bulldoze the 55,000-plus-square-foot building, something Dadoush said should be complete by the second week of July.

Washington calls the Bastian demolition plans a “small victory,” but says there is still more to do.

“The bigger task at hand is upcoming,” Washington said in an e-mail. The possible school closures “must be thought out carefully.”

HISD has only hinted at what the future of the Grimes, Rhoads, Stevenson and McDade campuses may look like if trustees close those schools.

At a recent school board meeting, trustees discussed turning Rhoads’ building into a school that would help “over-age” middle-schoolers move on to high school.

Meanwhile, HISD has had real estate appraisals done for at least two of the other three schools, Grimes and McDade.

HISD has not said it plans on selling either school site, but Bobadilla says that “going forward,” the district wants to make sure its police department is aware of all vacant properties so they can be added to officers’ regular patrol routes for monitoring.

The district also wants to make sure the vacant buildings receive a “certain level of maintenance,” Bobadilla said, so there are not any “rodents, broken windows or fences that need (to be) replaced.”

The 44,000-plus-square-foot building at Grimes, plus the 16 acres of land that surrounds it at Grimes Park, is worth more than $3.7 million, Integra Realty Resources, a real estate appraisal firm in Houston, said in a report completed in late March. The building was built in 1959 and renovated in 2004.

The firm does not recommend razing the property, saying that its value “is significantly greater” with the building in place than it would be as a vacant lot.

McDade Elementary School is worth less than Grimes, according to an appraisal completed by T.N. Edmonds and Associates in Houston. The real estate appraisal company estimates the school building and the more than eight acres of land it occupies is worth a little more than $3.1 million. McDade was built in 1962, and an addition was built three years later.

In the report, the company estimates the land is worth a little more than $1 million. It also recommends that the property be used for “public educational facilities...private charter schools/academies, institutional, religious or community centers.” (View the documents here. View Grimes’ documents here.)

HISD also had an appraisal done for Love Elementary School in the Houston Heights, which was at one point being considered for closure along with Grimes, McDade and Rhoads. You can view more details about the Love appraisal here. Texas Watchdog did not include Stevenson Elementary in its public information request because Stevenson was not being considered for closure then.

In response to a Texas Public Information Act request, HISD said that no similar appraisal documents existed for Rhoads Elementary.

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Contact Lynn Walsh at lynn@texaswatchdog.org or 713-228-2850 or on Twitter at @lwalsh.

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