Seminole County Schools approves $325M penny sales tax project list

Seminole County Public Schools approved an agreement with Seminole County and the seven cities to ask voters to renew a penny sales tax for the next decade – and for the first time, the public got a look at a detailed $325 million project list.

SCPS is the latest government agency to sign off on the penny sales tax renewal project, officially known as the One Cent Local Government Infrastructure Surtax. The board unanimously approved the penny sales tax project list with no discussion.

From left to right: School Board members Amy Pennock, Kelley Davis, Autumn Garick, Kristine Krause, Chair Abby Sanchez and SCPS Superintendent Serita Beamon at the June 18 board meeting.

After the approvals, School Board Chair Abby Sanchez thanked SCPS staff for helping prioritize the needs in the county, from air conditioning and roofing projects down to school building replacements.

“I don’t think people realize the magnitude when you’re the largest employer in Seminole County,” Sanchez said. “It is in the board book. You can see what buildings need to be completely replaced, what buildings may need just new painting, renovation, refresh, replace – the three Rs.”

No one from the public addressed the board on the projects (you can watch the meeting here). That might be because the detailed list of projects was added to the board agenda as an addendum, and an email from the board clerk announcing the additions was sent out at about noon on the same day as the board meeting, which started at 5:30 p.m. Commissioners did discuss the penny sales tax project list at their budget workshop, but those meetings are not broadcast.

When asked why the school board didn’t give the public more time to examine the list of projects, School Board Member Amy Pennock said the school board had to act quickly.

“We’ve been reviewing those for a while now, and, quite frankly, we were the last municipal agency to sign off on this,” Pennock said. “To delay it any further would cause issues, potentially for the whole county.”

The debate on which Seminole County Schools penny sales tax projects to keep and which projects to ax has been a hot topic in Oviedo (where the projects were narrowed down to traditional bridge-and-road infrastructure) and Winter Springs (where several projects were approved and then removed to make room for more stormwater improvements) and in Seminole County. The document and project lists for those governments have been circulating for weeks. Some governments have been debating the projects since 2023.

But Seminole County Public Schools – which is slated to get 25% of the tax revenue, estimated at $325 million over the next decade – has been an outlier. Its list of projects didn’t have dollar values attached, and were listed in general categories: bus replacements, air conditioning/envelope improvements, school building replacements, school renovations, school security improvements and school-based technology enhancements.

The mystery surrounding the projects is now gone. The specific school projects total $182.6 million, or 56 percent of the total in the next decade. The biggest expenses include $32.2 million for projects at Milwee Middle School in Sanford, $25.8 million for projects at Sanford Middle School and $23.7 million for projects at Winter Springs High School.

The projects in the greater Oviedo and Winter Springs areas include:

$23,704,216 at Winter Springs High School to refresh buildings 1 through 9. It includes a remodel of the window wall on buildings 8 and 9.
$17,860,200 at Keeth Elementary School in Winter Springs to remodel Building 1 and do a building addition of about 10,000 square feet.
$1,513,840 at Winter Springs Elementary School to refresh buildings 3, 5, 6 and 7.
$1,497,394 at Eastbrook Elementary School on the southern border with Orange County to refresh buildings 2, 4 and 5.
$1,820,775 at Geneva Elementary School to replace Building 15.

Roof replacement and air conditioning to take $100M in next decade

The rest of the projects listed include boosting security at schools, replacing buses and making sure every student has a digital device, such as a tablet or laptop, in secondary school. The projects also include more than $100 million in roofing and air conditioning upgrades at schools across the county. See below for a breakdown of projects.

“If we don’t have this fund available to us, we’re going to be be looking at aged facilities and we’re going to struggle to keep up with the repairs and maintenance of those,” Pennock said. “We want all our kids to learn in a safe, clean, state-of-the-art or updated learning environment, and we would be challenged if we didn’t have those funds.”

You can read the list of projects here. See below for a breakdown of projects.

School-based Security	$10,305,000	Security cameras, access control, single point of access, radio upgrades and communication upgrades
School-based (Student) Technology	$18,000,000	One-to-one device initiative for secondary schools
School-based HVAC Upgrades	$76,000,000	Replace or upgrade obsolete air conditioning (HVAC) controls and mechanical systems to improve operational and energy efficiency. Schools included: AltamonteElementary, Carillon Elementary, Early Learning Center, Eastbrook Elementary, Goldsboro Elementary,Idyllwilde Elementary, Milwee Middle, Sabal Point Elementary, Sanford Middle, Seminole High, SouthSeminole Middle, Spring Lake Elementary, Winter Springs Elementary
School-based Roof Replacement	$25,200,000	Replace or upgrade deteriorated roofs and/or roof drainage systems. Schools included: Eastbrook Elementary, Forest City Elementary, Sabal Point Elementary, MilweeMiddle, Lyman High, and Seminole High
Bus Replacement	$10,000,000	Purchase buses to reduce average age of fleet to less than 10 years to improve operational and fuel efficiency.
Athletic Facility Improvements	$2,900,000	Replace broken or obsolete gym bleachers throughout the district.
General School Improvements	$182,652,282	Replace, refurbish and refresh Seminole County Public Schools.

The breakdown of projects at SCPS by category (pie chart by Abe Aboraya)

School board quietly updates bathroom policy, AI

In addition to the penny sales tax, Seminole County Public Schools also quietly approved policy amendments to come into compliance with state laws.

That includes a requirement that students use the bathroom that corresponds with their sex assigned at birth. The school is also defining a modern form of cheating: Using generative artificial intelligence without crediting it.

School board members didn’t discuss the changes at the meeting. The board did discuss them at a workshop last month. You can listen to that meeting here.

Editor’s Note: The School Board of Seminole County Public Schools regularly hosts workshops where issues are discussed but not voted on. These workshops take place in the middle of the work day, cannot be attended virtually and the recordings are not made available to the public unless requested.

When the issue comes forward in the school board’s regular, published meetings it’s oftentimes placed on the consent agenda, where items are approved without comment because they have already been discussed in the workshops.

OCN reporter Abe Aboraya plans to regularly request these workshop recordings and they will be published in our articles concerning the meetings moving forward. The June 18 workshop was on the proposed 2024 budget.