ALBANY COUNTY —  As the sale of Clarksville Elementary from the Bethlehem Central School District to the Albany County Sheriff slowly wends its way toward approval, a resident of the Bethlehem district is making a last-ditch attempt to save the school.

But, it seems, no one is interested.

Jennifer Bull, a Delmar veterinarian, twice tried to buy Clarksville Elementary, located in the eponymous rural hamlet, but said she didn’t know what she would do with it. She said that she would be more than willing to pay $325,000, if the Bethlehem Central School District were willing to sell it.

Bull sent two request of purchase letters to Bethlehem Central School District; one on Jan. 16, 2018, and the other on Feb. 2, 2018, according to Hanna Teal, a spokeswoman for Bethlehem schools. Bull said that the two offers included checks. “Something to say I’m serious about this purchase offer,” she said.

Teal said the district can’t entertain Bull’s offer right now.

“The District is bound by the terms of a lease agreement with Albany County and in discussions with the County to sell the property to them,” Teal wrote in an email to questions from The Enterprise. “Therefore, the district is not in a position to entertain other offers at this time. Should the discussions with the County not result in a sale, and should the Board of Education at that time choose to list the property, we would welcome an offer from Dr. Bull or any other interested purchaser.”

 In June 2017, the district and the sheriff’s office had negotiated a lease-to-purchase agreement where, after leasing Clarksville Elementary for a three-year period, the sheriff’s office would buy the building for $325,000: $198,000 in actual money and $127,000 in in-kind patrol services.

The agreement then had to be reviewed by the Albany County attorney, Daniel Lynch.

The county attorney was not comfortable with the deal as it was presented.

The lease said, “That the Landlord may terminate this Agreement at any time if directed by the New York State Department of Education or any applicable law, rule or regulation to do so.”

The county attorney interpreted these words as: The sheriff, after paying $60,000 for rent in the first lease year; $66,000 in year two; and $72,000 in the third year (which in total is $198,000, and would be the cash side of the $325,000 proposed purchase price), at two years and 11 months into the lease, could be thrown out by the district.

The contract was then changed from a lease-to-purchase agreement to an outright sale.

At a Feb. 28 meeting of the Albany County Legislature’s Public Safety Committee, Sheriff Craig D. Apple asked the committee to hold off on authorizing the agreement to purchase Clarkesville Elementary. He said, “The county attorney would like to change two last-minute things. We’d rather wait and vote on the final product, if that’s possible.” The committee agreed to wait.

Chief Deputy William Rice told The Enterprise on March 8 that wording in the contract needed to be changed. The contract was changed from a lease-to-purchase agreement to an outright sale, and the wording had not yet reflected that change. Rice said that the Bethlehem School District was amenable to the change.    

Unable to purchase Clarksville Elementary herself, Bull still wants to see Bethlehem hold on to it for future use.

Many Clarksville residents objected to the closing of their neighborhood school in 2011 and a year ago many objected to selling the school, citing hour-long bus rides for their children and the property’s assessed value of $1.7 million.

“I think it’s important for a local school out there [in Clarksville]; it’s nice to have neighborhood schools, children learn better in neighborhood schools.

“There were multiple thoughts with no actual plan behind them,” Bull said. She said one idea was to talk with the Voorheesville Central School District, which Bull said is undergoing rapid growth, and is having a lot of trouble finding appropriate room for students. Bull does not have children in the Voorheesville school system.

Superintendent Brian Hunt told The Enterprise that the Voorheesville Central School District has enough room for students.

A 2015 presentation given by Hunt stated that enrollment in the district had declined 10.6 percent from 2000 to 2014, and concluded that enrollment had declined significantly in the past 20 years.

Jeremy Cramer, New Scotland’s building inspector, said that in the review process of any proposed housing, the school district in an “interested agency,” and is put on notice of the proposal. If the proposed housing were to affect the district’s capacity, it could then voice those concerns during the review process.

If a proposed development were big enough to affect the district’s student capacity, it would take a few years to make its way through the approval process and could be nearly a decade before building starts, Cramer said.

Country Club Estates is one the newer developments being built in New Scotland, where 30 of the proposed 40 homes have been built, and, Cramer estimated, anecdotally, there may be only 10 to 12 students in that development.

Cramer said that in the past three years only about a half-dozen homes had been built in New Scotland that lie in the Bethlehem school district. Currently, he said, there are no proposals for any type of large development in the area, and haven’t been for a while.

The Bethlehem Central School District does not anticipate population spikes either.

“In regards to capacity, the District has sufficient capacity in its buildings now and for the foreseeable future, based on the independent analysis done by the CDRPC [Capital District Regional Planning Commission], using many external indicators,” Teal wrote in an email to questions from The Enterprise.

The report from CDRPC said that total enrollment in Bethlehem schools has been on the decline for most of the last 10 years.

Bull said that there was a “misrepresentation or misreading of their [BCSD] supplier of facts [CDRPC], on what the growth is going to be and when it’s going to happen.”