CTC director offers ideas to keep Lebanon School District in fold

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By year’s end Lebanon School District is expected to make a decision on establishing its own vocational high school and withdrawing from the Lebanon County Career & Technology Center, Robert Okonak, district board representative for the county school’s joint operating committee, said at the JOC meeting Tuesday evening.

As LebTown reported from Lebanon School District’s meeting Monday, the district is weighing whether to leave the Lebanon County Career and Technology Center and launch its own in-house vocational program to serve more students.

Okonak announced the potential withdrawal Tuesday after LCCTC director Charles Benton offered two “draft ideas” intended to move the JOC forward on adopting the school’s first new Articles of Agreement in 30 years.

CTC administrators and the five other school district representatives in the JOC are trying to avoid further delays in plans for renovation or replacement of the vocational school’s current building, constructed from 1966 to 1968. The major sticking point for the city’s district has been the method used to determine the portion of bond payments each of the six participating Lebanon County school districts would pay annually.

First of Benton’s ideas is to restore a two-year withdrawal provision from the school administration’s draft last May of new Articles of Agreement for the CTC. The other option he offered would cap at $670,800 per year the portion of debt payment the Lebanon School District would have to pay to service a 30-year bond for the building project.

Cost estimates are $79.5 million to $93 million for renovation and $116.5 million for all-new construction, according to preliminary design drafts by the LCCTC’s architect on the project, Beers + Hoffman Architecture of Lancaster. Beers + Hoffman found savings in these latest estimates, as presented to the JOC at its April 21 meeting.

The Lebanon school board “would probably have an idea of our plans of whether we would go or not” by November or December, Okonak said.

“We’re strongly looking at pursuing withdrawing,” he added.

Annville-Cleona’s JOC member Darren Grumbine asked what the Lebanon district would offer students interested in vocational education in place of the Lebanon County CTC.

“We’re going to go in-house,” Okonak replied. The Lebanon school board is looking to replicate Lebanon County’s CTC in the district, he said, and it would probably take four or five years to develop a design for a career and technology center.

A Lebanon school board vote in November or December would give the board time to measure its constituents’ opinions of such a move, Okonak said.

ELCO JOC representative Jean Pierre Santos said that by dragging their feet on the matter, the Lebanon school board is causing the JOC to drag its feet on a project already beset by delays and inflated construction costs.

“This is a place for the county and not only our students,” Santos said.

Grumbine questioned whether Lebanon School District can build a new career and technology center more cheaply than if it paid its share of a 30-year bond for a new county facility.

Updated Articles of Agreement presented to the JOC last May use a 50/50 method of determining long-term debt allocation among the six districts, which gives equal weight to average daily membership of students enrolled and State Tax Equalization Board (STEB) numbers for determining each district’s property values. The Lebanon board wants the LCCTC to use STEB only, because its district has the county’s highest CTC enrollment and lowest property values. Okonak noted that the Lebanon district also has a high drop-out rate, with just 65% of its LCCTC students remaining in the program after their first year.

As with long-term debt and an individual district’s move to withdraw from the CTC, the Articles of Agreement update must be approved by all six districts to take effect. The Lebanon school board in June rejected the rewritten Articles by 8-1 vote.

Benton’s first of the two draft ideas would revive a provision in the Articles of Agreement update that would allow a district to withdraw from the CTC after giving at least two years’ notice. Currently, there is no such provision for withdrawal and the six districts are considered members in-perpetuity.

If the JOC chooses this path and adopts new articles, the district filing to withdraw would be responsible for debt and other financial obligations approved during the time it is a member, to give the CTC and its remaining five districts time to plan for the school’s enrollment, staffing, programs, and financial changes.

Benton pointed to the River Valley School District’s efforts to withdraw from the Indiana County Technical Center, in which the county’s presiding judge ruled in January that River Valley must pay its member share to the ICTC for 11 more years. That period would cover the entire school career of River Valley students who attend its schools from kindergarten through 12th grade, up to the point the district is still officially a CTC member.

Benton’s second “draft idea” is aimed at maintaining Lebanon School District within the CTC. In it, the district would remain a CTC member in exchange for a cap of $670,800 per year paid for its share of the proposed facility bond, in exchange for a limit on the number of high school students the district is guaranteed in a school year to have a slot at the Lebanon County CTC.

Any amount to be paid above Lebanon city’s $670,800 cap would be divided equally in payments from the other five districts participating in the LCCTC: Annville-Cleona, Cornwall-Lebanon, Eastern Lebanon County, Northern Lebanon, and Palmyra. Lebanon’s guaranteed enrollment cap would be estimated by using the average of its opening day enrollment for 2023-24, 2024-25 and 2025-26, and seats for students above the district’s cap would be made available first to those five other districts.

Okonak told the JOC at its last meeting, June 16, that the 50/50 method for determining its portion of the annual renovation debt would virtually double it to $1.1 million.

Benton told the board he would have two estimates in time for the Sept. 15 JOC meeting: The operations side of budgets for the districts if there are five districts rather than six and estimates of the annual debt service cost increases to the other districts, based on the $670,800 per year cap proposal for Lebanon.

Also:

The JOC approved, 6-0, the county CTC’s comprehensive plan for 2026-29, which identifies the strengths and challenges identified throughout the school’s areas of study. The full, 46-page comprehensive plan can be found below.

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CTC director offers ideas to keep Lebanon School District in fold

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