According to former Sedona-Oak Creek School District Superintendent Dennis Dearden, the district is now providing teacher housing to its staff at eight studio apartments at a property on Van Deren Road in Uptown.

District benefactors Basil and Mimi Maher had planned to assist SOCSD in converting Building C of the former Big Park Community School in the Village of Oak Creek into affordable condos for teachers.

Those plans to help teachers with housing were scrapped after Yavapai County District 3 Supervisor Donna Michaels began a push to have the county lease the school campus from the school district under a lease-to-purchase agreement.

Early language in the county’s letter of intent refers to the possibility of converting that building into housing for county staff but no final plans have been made.

The Mahers were also planning to turn a 14-unit property on Jordan Road in Uptown into teacher housing, but Yavapai County School Superintendent Tim Carter stated that after inspecting the property, the repairs were judged too costly to pursue.

Basil Maher had previously said that the purchase price of the Jordan Road building was $4.2 million and that the cost of repairs would be about $100,000. Instead, the Mahers will rent their Van Deren property, which will remain in the couple’s ownership, to SOCSD.

The change in location to Van Deren has come at the cost of the loss of a $500,000 matching grant from the state of Arizona.

“The problem is that there was nothing to match,” Carter said. “[The Mahers] had already paid the full price of the property. We had to tell them ‘sorry, we can’t give you $500,000.’ I think they understood that. We obviously cleared all this with the Arizona Department of Education because they’re the fiscal agent for grants and they agreed to that.”

One condition of the $500,000 grant was that the district must own the property to which the grant would be applied, which excluded both the conversion of the BPCS site to the county and the Jordan Road deal with the Mahers.

“What’s happened in the meantime is the Mahers are really taking care of all the teachers, they bought numerous properties, they’re continuing to buy properties,” Dearden said. “They told us, ‘Why don’t we just slow down right now, and wait, because the teachers are already taken care of?’ We’ll see [how] the situation with the BPCS and Yavapai County option to purchase goes in the next year … It’s a better deal for the district and we really appreciate Basil and Mimi Maher [for] working toward really solving some of those teacher housing problems.”

Carter said that the $500,000 is in the process of being redistributed to fund other teacher housing projects, along with $100,000 left over from a project in Page and $250,000 from the Sonita School District, which was unable to finalize a building purchase.

Any of the 13 rural counties in Arizona can apply for up to $500,000 of those funds as a matching grant. The application deadline is Thursday, Aug. 10.