Hartley, Iowa — It has been a busy few years for the Hartley-Melvin-Sanborn Community School District. After an $18.9 million bond issue passed in April of 2018, several construction projects were completed. Now, the HMS School Board is deciding what to do with the former HMS Elementary building in Hartley.
Board Member Chad Lyman tells us they were originally just going to demolish the building and sell the property, either as a block, or re-zoned into lots. But an interesting new proposal has surfaced.
Lyman says an out-of-town non-profit group would like to remodel the building. They’d like to turn the upstairs into “professional apartments,” with the ground floor around the gymnasium being turned into a bed-and-breakfast. An addition to the building would be remodeled into daycare overflow.
Lyman says the board members view the proposal with varying degrees of skepticism.
A public hearing is set for Wednesday, December 1st at the HMS High School Media Center to help inform the board as to how the residents of the school district feel about the proposal and what they’d like the board to do.
Lyman says some Hartley City Council members present at the last school board meeting were concerned about what would happen if the venture failed and the building turned into an eyesore that neither the School nor the City could easily take care of.
He tells us that ideally, the board would have the matter taken care of somehow before the coldest part of the winter hits so they wouldn’t have to heat the building.
A new pre-K through fourth-grade building opened in 2020, with the new middle school opening this fall.
That meeting again is Wednesday, December 1st at 6:30 p.m. in the media center of the Hartley-Melvin-Sanborn High School in Hartley.
