By Jack Encarnacao, Globe Correspondent, 3/14/2004
For sale: A 91-year-old brick building on two lush green acres in Vermont , tall pillars and remnants of chalk dust.
The Mount Anthony Union Middle School in Bennington , Vt. , is up for grabs, but interested parties should not contact school officials through a real estate agent. They may "do it on eBay."
The Mount Anthony Union School Board will decide on March 22 whether to sell the school using the popular online auction site, an approach some school systems across the country have also tried.
There is much deliberation ahead. A potential buyer's usage of the old school has to serve the community's interest and satisfy zoning laws. Also, the school system must prepare itself for a possible deluge of responses. No one knows just how popular the middle school will be once it becomes available on the Web.
Sean-Marie Oller, the board's vice chairwoman, said she has heard about schools in the Midwest being sold on eBay and is optimistic that the website is the best option for Bennington .
"I think we need to explore," she said. "I think it might bring something that we don't expect."
The town of Gaylord , Kan. , population 140, sold a school through eBay, and certainly did not expect to make $25,000 from sale of a building town officials could not even give away.
But while eBay has performed revenue miracles for some small towns with schools to sell, it has also proved a bust in some cases. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that two schools on 260,000 acres of land in Minnesota sold for just $2 last month on eBay.
This is why Barbara Worth, executive director of the Council of Educational Facility Planners International, is reluctant to call eBay school sales a national trend.
"Everything gets sold on eBay; that's for sure," she said. "There are a lot of innovative things coming up for schools to make money. . . . The federal money isn't there. States are strapped."
The Mount Anthony Union school board decided to consider the high-tech selling approach after more traditional approaches faltered. Robert Marcoux, assistant superintendent of finance for the district, estimated that it would cost $1,000 to list Mount Anthony Union on eBay, compared with a $3,000 fee for a traditional auction listing. He also said that advertising in regional newspapers, which can be expensive, has had minimal effect in drawing attention to the school. "We want to dispose of the old building in a timely manner," Marcoux said. "One of the prime opportunities is through eBay."
Until two weeks ago, the Mount Anthony Union school board had all but completed an agreement with Regional Affordable Housing Corp., which wanted to convert the 80,000-square-foot middle school into apartments and a public gymnasium.
Because the school was being sold to a private company and had previously received state aid, state law required that 30 percent of the sale go back to the state.
The board, content with the planned usage of the site and eager to move 700 students and staff into a new, $19 million facility in August, kept its asking price low. "We had pretty much given the building away for $1," Oller said. The deal, agreed to in October, was a formality. Sometime later, a friend of Oller's e-mailed her a story about an abandoned Kansas school that had sold on eBay for $50,000.
Oller forwarded the message to her colleagues on the board.
"When I sent the e-mail, I had a huge grin on my face," she said. "I thought it was an interesting, amusing piece of information that I should pass on. I didn't think much about it."
Regional Affordable Housing Corp.'s executive director resigned two weeks ago, however, which led the housing corporation to back away from the agreement. That put the 11-member school board back at square one, and Oller's e-mail resurfaced.
"We had to think outside the box," Oller said.
Marcoux is getting ideas from David Rose, founder and president of Midwest E-Services Inc. of Salina , Kan. , a year-old company that specializes in advertising real estate on eBay.
Rose sold the Kansas school.
"We're just amazed by the results," Rose said of the response of potential buyers. Rose said his first sale was the one in Gaylord. The town was willing to give it away or spend $140,000 to tear it down, so selling it saved the town money.
Rose said he is overseeing the sale of five other schools on eBay.
"If, at the end of this story, we have a new $19 million building and we sold our old middle school successfully on eBay, I would be thrilled," Oller said.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.