TYLER — The Russell-Tyler-Ruthton Facility Task Force has made a recommendation to close some or all of the existing three school facilities and to build a new pre-K to 12th grade school facility and they will pass that information along to the school board at its Nov. 14 meeting.

Due to the complexity of the issues at hand, the recommendation — which was nearly unanimous — includes several parts.

“They want a pre-K to 12 facility and they want it built in Tyler,” RTR Superintendent Dave Marlette said. “It may be built on the existing site or there are another site or two that may also work. We’re leaning toward the current site, but that hasn’t been determined yet.”

The RTR Facility Task Force spent three months examining the current facilities, identifying needs assessments and looking at a wide-range of different facility improvement options. Marlette said it was important that the process come from the bottom-up, with the community driving the recommendations to go forward.

The task force recommendation is: “That the School board of Independent School District No. 2902 (RTR) be authorized to close some of all of its existing three school facilities and to issue general obligation school building bonds to provide funds for the acquisition and betterment of school sites and facilities, including the construction and equipping of a new (pre-K to 12) school facility and related site improvements, in Tyler, Minnesota, to replace the closed school facilities, at a site to be determined.”

“The recommendation was to have the new facility in town because we need the infrastructure,” Marlette said. “If you go out in the country, you have to build all the infrastructure like sewer and water.”

The second part of the recommendation is: “In addition, in each of the communities where an attendance center is closed, the RTR School District will appoint a Community Development Committee for 18 months to actively pursue an approved developer for the vacated school facility. At the end of 18 months, if no developer is found for the vacated facility, the RTR School District will contract and pay for the demolition of the facility.”

“We don’t want those buildings to be eye-sores, so we will take care of it if they cannot find a developer for those pieces of property,” Marlette said. “In Balaton, we were so lucky to have Ralco come in there. There may be another Ralco out there that will look at these buildings. But if not, the board will take care of it.”

Marlette said the ball in the school board’s court now.

While this recommendation has come forward, the school board is not bound to it,” he said. “The board can take this recommendation and go forward with it, they can change it in some way or choose to do nothing with it. But they were looking for input and they wanted the community to tell them what to do next. We didn’t want it to be a top-down process where the board makes all the decisions.”

A District-Wide Facility Improvement Survey went out to all RTR voters. The survey was was open for 40 days and 636 stakeholders participated. Marlette said 194 of the stakeholders also took the time to write a comment about how they felt toward improving the RTR facilities.

“Over 90 percent of the survey participants felt we need to improve our RTR facilities,” he said. “Over 74 percent indicated that they would support a facility bond for improvements. Over 79 percent indicated that they support a new centralized (K-12) facility over the present program of having three locations of school attendance centers.”

In addition, more than 73 percent of the survey participants felt that the present facilities are a concern for new families considering a move into one of the three communities, while 78 percent felt new facilities would result in more open enrolled students coming to RTR Schools.

“We’re losing about 35 students a year,” Marlette said. “There are 35 more students enrolling out of the district than in. That’s about a $400,000 loss every year. So we feel very strongly that with this new facility that we can turn that around. If we have more open enrolled students coming in rather than out then that revenue stream will certainly help us.”

The task force consisted of 33 people, with at least 10 from the three communities that make up RTR. During the process, the task force identified 15 vital areas of facility assessment that were currently in weak to poor condition.

“They identified weaknesses in our buildings,” Marlette said. “Our schools have to be run like a business. It’s not good financial business to try and keep 90-­year-old buildings or whatever open and keep up all the maintenance, energy and all the different things when you could have it all under one roof in one facility. It’s more economical.”

Marlette added that busing, custodial work and food service were among the issues that were looked at as well.

The RTR District voters could soon have a choice to make with an election most likely coming sometime in early February or early April.

“The first thing the board will do is receive the recommendation from the task force,” Marlette said. “Then I’d guess there would be discussions about it. The board is not bound by the recommendation, but let’s say the board decides to move forward with it. They could vote to do that later in the meeting (on Nov. 14). Then we’d end up picking one of the dates to hold an election.”

Marlette said the state has guidelines and timelines that need to be met.

“If we go on February 12, we’d need to start the process on November 30,” he said. “We’d need to adopt a resolution, contact the county auditor, do the ballot — there’s a calendar the state puts out that you have to do things by a certain date.”

Marlette said the RTR School Board doesn’t raise property taxes willingly or without good cause. The district has been one of the most conservative tax districts in the state, he said. But he added that if the recommendation goes forward, it would be an investment in the students’ future.