— Article originally appeared in The Burton View, January 30, 2025, written by Gary Gould.

BURTON — Outside the window to Superintendent Kristy Spann’s office sits three unused medical buildings, one of which she hopes to turn into a preschool classroom for the Bentley Community Schools district.

Three buildings owned by McLaren Health Care, located adjacent to the Bentley Middle School/High School campus, that sit on 4.5 acres, will be gifted to the school district in the weeks ahead, she said.

Two buildings are located just west of the Bentley campus on Belsay Road, while a third sits at Belsay Road bordering the driveway into the campus on the northern side and by Taco Bell on the southern side.

“The board of education and I have been thinking about how do we get our little ones into pre-school? Because currently we have one classroom in the portable (building) at Barhitte Elementary, which has up to 18 kids,” Spann said. “And once that class is full, the rest of the kids are out of luck.”

She noted the classroom at Barhitte is run by the Genesee Intermediate School District (GISD). A new program would be run and staffed by Bentley Community Schools.

Spann said currently if the children have resourceful parents and the means to take them somewhere else, they usually end up attending preschool in another school district.

Once the children are in another school district’s preschool program, they make friends there and parents will either stay using Schools of Choice or will move to that district for their children to continue school there.

“They feel like they understand the system where they’re going,” Spann said. “They’ll make the trek. They’ve been doing it, they’ll just continue.”

She said the result is Bentley’s community fabric is slowly deteriorating as many children are leaving to go to school elsewhere. Spann also said this is hard on the neighborhoods.

“It’s about our children having access to an early childhood educational environment,” she said. “They deserve excellent opportunities to play with and learn from one another in ways that we know are pedagogically sound. For their intellect. For their social/emotional development. For their physical development. We want this for all children.”

With only one classroom available, Spann said the district is limited and the cost to build a new facility would be too much.

About a year ago she said she began to question what was going on with the McLaren-owned buildings, which appeared to no longer be in use.

Spann said she also spoke with the Bentley Board of Education, specialists in early childhood education from around the state and people in the community to see what this would look like if we were to have an early childhood program here.

While the district doesn’t have enough children to fill three buildings, she said they could use one building for early childhood and a second for some sort of community-based program.

With the board’s blessing, Spann said she put together a proposal and reached out to McLaren Health Care.

After some conversations she said she had a meeting with the director of Off Campus Real Estate for McLaren, along with an architect and civil engineer, before going through the buildings.

Spann said McLaren announced in September it would gift the property to Bentley Community Schools.

However, in order to make this happen, Spann said this will be a “very big ticket item,” at around $2 million to properly renovate the first building for an early childhood program.

Spann said the district has some debt that will fall off this year, such that the district could go to the voters and ask for, on behalf of the children, a “no-tax increase” over the previous year’s debt.

This would keep the tax rate the same, so there would be no increase, but also no reduction, she said.

“It would just continue what (taxpayers) are currently paying,” Spann said. “And that would allow us about $2.7 million to be able to renovate the building.”

The move would allow the district to remodel one of the buildings, she said, adding the rest will have to be figured out over time.

In addition, Spann said she hopes the district can obtain a couple of state grants for $50,000-$75,000. She said she also talked to the Mott Foundation and while there has been no commitment yet, she added they are exploring her request.

Spann said if all goes well, she’d like to see the first building – the early childhood program – open by the end of next fall.

“It’s ridiculously ambitious,” she said. “But we’re talking about the children of this community, we need to start providing this service.”

A second building might be repurposed later as a community center, but no plans have been developed for that use at this time, Spann said.

Because the preschool will have to be properly licensed through Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential (MiLEAP) and Michigan Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) she said she needed an expert in preschool – someone who knows how the process works.

The district has hired Chelsea Horton as the district director of early childhood education, Spann said. Horton was previously the early childhood director at Lake Fenton Community Schools.

If all goes as planned, she said Bentley Community School voters will be asked to approve the ‘no-tax increase’ in May.

“We are going to do what’s best for children,” Spann said. “Because they are our future.”

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