Audubon Charter offered temporary sites on westbank or lakefront

Audubon Charter School's Broadway campus.

Audubon Charter School has two new options for a temporary campus during a planned two-year renovation of its Broadway building — modular buildings in a parking lot behind the school board offices in Algiers or the site of the former Jean Gordon school near the University of New Orleans campus — but a deadline is looming in about two weeks for a decision, officials said.

The planned expansion of the Audubon school building on Broadway Street will require temporary classroom space for the students there for about two years. Officials had identified a vacant lot in the Lower Garden District for modular buildings, but that plan was abandoned earlier this summer amid concerns about high levels of lead in the soil there.

Without temporary space, Audubon risks losing the federal money for the renovations altogether, school officials have said, so they have continued searching for new locations. During an Orleans Parish School Board property-committee meeting on Thursday, school board Chief Financial Officer Stan Smith said the westbank and lakefront lots for modular buildings were the only two new options that have emerged.

It is already too late to move the students to either of those options before school starts, so students will spend the fall at Broadway and the move would have to take place over the Christmas holidays, Smith said. But in order for the contractor to have time to build the modular campus, the school board needs an answer from Audubon by Aug. 1.

Smith said his only response so far from Audubon has been that their board will decide by the deadline. The Audubon board had not scheduled a meeting during July, and an email asking if a special board meeting would be held was not answered Friday morning.

Audubon does have a third option for swing space, Smith told the property committee: Find their own location.