The Fayette County School System has embarked on reworking its five-year facility plan that could ultimately lead to discovering the fate of East Fayette Elementary School.

Director of Facility Services Mike Satterfield explained this week that school officials have just started working on the new five-year facilities plan.

“After we finish the process, we’ll make a recommendation to the board and they’ll decide what to do about East Fayette,” said Satterfield.

If the board decides to close the school, Satterfield said a recommendation would have to be made to the state, and the process would begin to close the county’s oldest school building

“I think public hearings would occur after the facilities plan is completed,” he added.

The fate of the school has hung in the balance for more than six months during the school system’s deliberations over new boundaries for the county’s elementary schools.

At least two school board members are quite open in their opinion of closing the school.

“I want East Fayette repurposed,” said board member Marion Key at December’s meeting where the new boundaries were decided.

Board member Bob Todd also opposed the motion during the December meeting and said the final motion was worded differently than the written version presented to the board by Superintendent of Education John DeCotis.

“His recommendation was that at the end of the process it (East Fayette) would be closed, but that’s not how the new recommendation was worded. I just hope we’re not going to keep that school open,” he said.

Todd added that a committee of 28 parents came up with the suggestion of closing the school, and, “East Fayette folks have been paying to build new schools for years.”

During the boundary deliberations, Assistant Superintendent of Education Lyn Wenzel told the board that East Fayette could be used to house the system’s involuntary alternative school, along with the school nutrition program and after-school program.

School officials also said that closing the school would result in an annual savings of $644,000 in administrative salaries.

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