REAL ESTATE
The student activity center
PINE RIDGE LOOKS TAILOR-MADE
FOR SHOOTING A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE MOVIE.
32 FEATURE
SEVEN DAYS
03.05.14-03.12.14
SEVENDAYSVT.COM
Unused computers
C
ommercial real estate broker Jed Dousevicz unlocks the front door of the unoccupied Delano Administration Building and lets a small group of prospective buyers inside, along with a journalist and a photographer. At first glance, the building doesn’t look vacant, more like the owners are running errands and due back shortly. But the longer we explore this structure — and 13 others on the sprawling, 128acre Pine Ridge School campus for sale in rural Williston — the more it feels like the previous tenants actually bolted on short notice, as though fleeing deadly contagion. Indeed, the administration building, like most of Pine Ridge, looks tailor-made for shooting a zombie apocalypse movie. Framed pictures still hang on the walls. Desks and filing cabinets are littered with yellowed notebooks and blueprints. Sweaters and jackets still hang in a closet. An American flag stands in a corner behind the reception desk, where a telephone and message pad seem to await incoming calls. “It’s kind of spooky,” observes Amy Demetrowitz, director of real estate
A bank of vacant lockers
Campus Lifeless
Five years after Pine Ridge School closed, the Williston property remains eerily quiet B Y K EN P I C A R D | P HO T O S B Y O L I V ER PA R I N I
development for Champlain Housing Trust. She’s on the tour, along with CHT chief operating and financial officer Michael Monte, to eyeball the property for potential development ideas. Dousevicz agrees. His firm, V/T Commercial, has been trying for years to sell this property on behalf of its client, People’s United Bank. “It’s like they shut the lights off, walked out and never came back again,” he says. Until five years ago, this wooded and hilly campus, with its stunning views of Mt. Mansfield, was home to a private boarding school founded in 1968 to educate teens with learning difficulties, primarily dyslexia. At its peak, Pine Ridge employed more than 100 faculty and staff and had an enrollment of 115 students. As many as 98 students lived on campus year-round in three spacious, modern dorms. But by the early 2000s, many students with learning disabilities had been mainstreamed into public schools, and Pine Ridge fell on hard times. As public funding for private schools dried up and a dwindling number of families shelled out
the $56,000 annual tuition — day students paid $27,500 — the school began opening its doors to kids with emotional and behavioral difficulties. In the words of its last board of trustees, Pine Ridge “drifted far from its original mission.” In 2006, trustees hoping to save their beleaguered institution hired headmaster Dana Blackhurst, a wealthy, well-connected and controversial special educator. When Blackhurst arrived in April 2007, he inherited a drastically diminished enrollment and $1.4 million in debt. He tried steering the school back to fiscal solvency, in part by cutting staff and slashing tuition to attract new students. But the school’s downward spiral was irreversible. In March 2009, Blackhurst announced that Pine Ridge would close permanently that June following its graduation ceremony. The campus has remained vacant and unused ever since. During our tour, the second conducted that day by V/T Commercial, Dousevicz explains some of the challenges of selling this attractive but complicated real estate. People’s United Bank foreclosed on the
property at a time when the national real estate market was deep in the toilet and few buyers were interested in a $3.5 million price tag. Moreover, because the entire campus sits in Williston’s agricultural/rural/residential zoning district — an area designated for minimum development — its uses are limited. Current zoning laws would allow a developer to, say, scrape the land bare of all existing structures, then build luxury homes on 2-plus-acre lots — an expensive and impractical option. Much of the land is mapped as deer wintering area, further hindering new construction; other areas are steeply wooded hillsides. In short, Dousevicz says, virtually the only practical way to use the property is as the site of another school, hospital or house of worship. Considering the facilities available — and the discounted price of $2.8 million — a school or hospital seems the likeliest candidate. Dousevicz leads us downstairs to the Beal Dining Hall, where plates, bowls, trays and silverware are stacked on shelves and rolling carts, seemingly awaiting an