Suttons Bay Public Schools Superintendent Talks Roadmap For Bond Projects

The end of the decade: That’s when Suttons Bay Public Schools Superintendent Casey Petz says the district hopes to complete the full list of projects earmarked in the sizable $18.3 million bond that local voters approved this past spring. It’s a long haul, Petz acknowledges, and it could be even longer depending on construction delays and other unforeseen circumstances. But Petz also assures that the district is “chugging along” with design and planning work for the bond work, and that the community will be looped into those plans in the not-so-distant future.

“I know people are definitely curious about what $18-plus million dollars of bond work looks like in the modern day,” Petz tells the Leelanau Ticker when asked for a status update on SBPS’s lengthy project slate. The bond, which voters passed by a 776 to 628 margin in May, included everything from replacing windows to tearing down underutilized facilities.

Four and a half months on from the bond’s passage, none of those projects have actually kicked off yet, but Petz assures that progress is happening behind the scenes. This summer, for instance, SBPS’s campus and buildings were crawling with engineers, who surveyed the site’s topography, assessed heating, plumbing, mechanical, and electrical equipment, and started planning demolition work. Now, those engineering teams are drawing up the first schematics for bond projects – plans Petz says should be ready to present to the public before the end of the year.

“The way that this bond was structured is in three series,” Petz explains. “We had our first bond sale in June, which is about $6 million, and it set in motion the design, engineering, and schematic work for our top priorities, which are safety, security, right-sizing, and efficiency. That design work can be done upfront while we're planning for series two stuff, which is is more along the lines of getting a good section of our building down and then expeditiously putting a big section back up. So, phase one is a lot of planning, pre-work, and engineering, which means your first chunk of bond money doesn't look like a whole lot in terms of major changes. It's the second year where you start to see shovels in the ground.”

Specifically, Petz points to next spring or summer as when locals should “start to see more actual construction activity on site.”

The first projects “on deck,” according to Petz, include a boiler relocation, a new connector to join the two buildings on campus, a redesign for the middle school entrance vestibule, and a new concession stand to serve several athletic fields that will need to be relocated as part of the project. Most of those projects fit directly into one or more of the top three bond priorities. The connector and entrance vestibule projects, for instance, will help make the school safer and more secure, while the boiler relocation will allow SBPS to take down 50,000 square feet of underutilized space without taking part of the district’s heating infrastructure offline.

“We have quite a bit of campus space, and quite bit of excessive square footage in our buildings, but solving that problem is not as easy as getting the bulldozers on site and taking things down,” Petz notes. “There’s a ton of engineering design work that has to be done to move boilers and change boilers out, to redo facades, and to consolidate the buildings. We’re prioritizing all those things in our initial design work, so that when we’re ready to take something down, we're not going to lose heat, we're not going to lose the ability to maintain the spaces we're using from a day-to-day educational standpoint.”

Another major project on the docket is the demolition and reconstruction of the old SBPS middle school gym, an auxiliary structure that Petz says is mostly used for athletic practices, not actual games or competitions. That project isn’t necessarily a top district priority, but “could potentially swing ahead of schedule” simply because of its age.

“That facility was outdated about 20-30 years ago,” Petz says. “The building is 70-plus years old, and it's in a not-great state of repair. It’s also a terribly expensive building to heat and cool. So, it's got a lot of needs in terms of getting it into an operational state for what we need to use it for, and where that puts us is that it's better to tear it down and put a new one back up.”

All told, Petz says SBPS is “looking at a 3-4-year window to complete the majority of the projects” outlined in the bond, which means the total campus transformation should be “done or nearing completion by the summer of 2029.” In other words, students who are eighth-graders at SBPS this year will likely have graduated high school by the time the full scope of the bond work is done.

In the meantime, though, Petz says the silver lining of a bond predicated largely on consolidation rather than expansion is that disruptions to students should be minimal.

“We’re talking about taking down 55,000 square feet of space that's currently vacant or underused,” Petz says. “A lot of things we’re doing are going to be reasonably low-impact in terms of disruption to the day-to-day operations of the school, just based on the very nature of the bond. There will be disruptions, for sure, but it’ll be mostly around the logistics of getting onto campus, getting off campus, and moving around campus. Otherwise, I don’t foresee major disruptions to what our families and our students are experiencing on a day-to-day basis.”