District officials revealed one more site for a potential new grades 5-6 school to the public during the Austin Public School Board special session Monday.

Mark Stotts, director of finance and operations, told board members one of the sites district officials had looked at was the land where Fellowship United Methodist Church, off of Seventh Avenue SE, was located. The property is adjacent to Ellis Middle School.

“Basically, it’s 10 acres on the south side of Ellis,” Stotts told the board.

The property would be advantageous as the new school could share baseball diamonds and fields with Ellis, which could be easily scheduled, according to Stotts.

District officials have identified nine potential sites thus far, although they aren’t interested in all of them. They have spoken with the owners from four sites and are particularly interested in one site. Stotts said district officials aren’t revealing which sites they’ve identified yet, aside from the lot formerly occupied by K-Mart on Eighth Street NE. Stotts told the board school officials will have two or three potential sites for board members to mull over at a special public meeting June 6.

District officials aren’t naming sites they’ve identified in order to keep property owners from potentially raising the price of whatever land they publicly express an interest in.

“It just makes it hard because when you’re in the middle of negotiations and you’re exploring a particular property, maybe if you’re looking at multiple properties, you don’t want toss out names,” Stotts said. “Then you’ve just hampered your bargaining position. We’re trying to keep costs as low as possible.”

While school officials have identified sites, they’ve already started paring down the locations that would cost more than $30 million for one reason or another. One of the task force stipulations was that no facilities project cost more than $30 million, a proposal board members have tacitly, if not officially, agreed to.

While district officials have talked with several owners, those have just been preliminary in nature, according to Stotts.

“We’ve got no firm proposals at this point,” he said. “With all the property owners we’ve talked to, if we’ve talked about price, it’s been very, very informally. There’s been no formal offers or anything of that nature.”

District officials won’t put together offers until they hear back from K-Mart representatives, who are expected to give school officials a proposal next week. Stotts said that although K-mart is a popular suggestion, the old K-Mart building would have to be entirely renovated. Rough projections from Amcon Construction show renovating the building would cost about as much as building a new building. In addition, district officials would have to get K-Mart to give up its lease on the property and buy the property for itself.

“They’re pretty much equal price,” Stotts said. “Then you get down to the cost of the land, and the site that it’s going to be on.”

District officials can’t agree to a site so soon, however. According to Stotts, they are keeping their options open and will reveal site locations as soon as they can.

“We really can’t commit to anything until a bond referendum would pass,” Stotts said. “Even if we had a purchase agreement in place, it would be subject to a bond referendum.”