School board meetings relocating due to serious mold issues in district office building

The Marion County Public Schools administration building is shown on Southeast 3rd Street in Ocala, Fla. on Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2021. [Bruce Ackerman/Ocala Gazette] 2021.

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Posted December 17, 2021 | By James Blevins
james@ocalagazette.com

Marion County Public Schools (MCPS) announced on Dec. 9 that it would soon be relocating its main district office to 1614 E. Fort King St. in Ocala on the Marion Technical Institute (MTI) campus.

The move comes as a result of recent internal reports indicating that the current building, located at 512 S.E. 3^rd St., poses serious moisture and mold issues.

Marion County School Board (MCSB) meetings and work sessions will also move to MTI and be held in the Browne Greaton Cole Auditorium.

Both changes of venue are planned to occur by the first of the coming year, with the school board hoping to have it’s first meeting at the new location during the first week of January.

Barbara Dobbins, executive director of Operations and Emergency Management at MCPS, informed the school board during a recent administrative briefing and work session on Dec. 9 that the 114-year-old building on Southeast 3^rd Street was last fully renovated in 1967.

“In that renovation,” she said, “we failed to do one thing that put us in this situation. We failed to put a vapor or moisture barrier between the brick walls and the now current gypsum board walls. So basically, we’ve closed in and created a terrarium of issues.”

An initial assessment was done in 2019, added Dobbins, but it was primarily done visually. However, the 2021 assessment was more hands on in nature.

“We asked them to literally cut holes in the walls and look behind them with cameras, producing a report,” she said.

Based out of Tampa, Gallagher Bassett Technical Services produced its Moisture Impact Assessment report on Oct. 28. The report stated that its purpose was to identify moisture-impacted building materials and other factors which may have affected indoor air quality.

On Oct. 11 and 12, the assessment team discovered multiple examples of staining, damage, and/or mold growth throughout the county administration office building with later laboratory analysis for all samples collected from the building confirming those initial on-site findings.

“It was recommended that people should not be in this building long term,” added Dobbins.

Senior Industrial Hygiene Project Manager for Gallagher Bassett John LeJeune said before the MCSB on Dec. 9 that it wasn’t just one source of intrusion but several that were damaging the building.

“We did find a combination of water intrusion, which is free water or rain water intruding into the building, moisture intrusion in certain areas, and condensation,” said LeJeune, mentioning that he could see with the naked eye mold growth just about anywhere he looked.

Operations Manager for Gallagher Bassett Mike Sewell seconded much of what LeJeune said to the board.

“We just let our eyes and our noses lead us and identified these areas of concern,” he said. “We’re not doctors. We just tell you what’s here and make some recommendations. But this building has some issues.”

In order to solve the issues that the building currently has, Dobbins said, the building would have to be brought all the way back to its original brick structure and renovated out from there, an option the board didn’t appear to entertain.

Board member Don Browning stated that he was primarily concerned with staff health, urging an immediate move of venue for future MCSB meetings and work sessions.

“If we’re not going to fix it immediately,” he said, “I want out of this building. We need to be focusing on the health of everyone who enters here.”

Superintendent of Schools Diane Gullet informed the board that she had already made the decision to move 14 employees out of the building, so there would not be any additional risks to their health.

Three area superintendents who previously worked within the building, along with their assistants for a total of six additional employees, were also relocated from the current district office, said Gullet, to work instead at each respective school site they supervise.

She stressed that staff would be relocated to unoccupied adult spaces at MTI that are not presently in use, so there will be no disruption of the students who are currently enrolled on campus.

Cummings hoped to clarify to the public that the decision to move venues did not come out of nowhere.

“This was not a knee-jerk reaction,” he said. “It’s been ongoing for a long time. We’ve had employees with adverse reactions to the environment here. And it is our obligation to make a decision to put them in a safer place.”

Dobbins assured the school board that staff at its current location would be fully relocated and working from the MTI campus by Dec. 17.

The school board said it planned on officially voting on the move of venue at its next board meeting later this month, but, according to Kevin Christian, director of Public Relations for MCPS on Dec. 15, the board had yet to determine the future of the building or arrive at an estimate on how much it might cost to repair it.