It’s crystal clear: The ‘Crystal Palace’ has to go | Steve Bousquet
Columnist Steve Bousquet traces the history of the Broward school board trying to sell its palatial-looking headquarters, an idea now taking on new urgency.
The name conjures up images of luxury, glitz and extravagance — everything the Broward County school district should not be.
“Crystal Palace” has been the unofficial name for the district’s headquarters for as long as anyone can remember (in fact, for three decades). It’s also the name of a haven for high rollers — a casino and resort hotel in the Bahamas — which is more like it.
The 14-story blue-glass building in Fort Lauderdale began its life as a Capital Bank headquarters. The school board, desperate to leave a depressing cluster of ramshackle barracks and trailers in Sailboat Bend, bought it for $23 million as a hollowed-out shell in the 1980s, then invested another $9 million into extensive renovations.
The building sustained major damage during Hurricane Wilma in October 2005, but it’s still the home of hundreds of school district employees and the site of many school board decisions. Once again, some school board members think it’s time the education system were located someplace else.
The Palace’s official name is the Kathleen C. Wright Administration Center, named in memory of a respected educator who served two terms on the school board and worked at Nova Southeastern University.
Wright died in the August 1985 crash of a Delta Air Lines jetliner in Dallas. The flight began in Fort Lauderdale, and Wright was on her way to a Delta Sigma Theta sorority gathering.
Moving would require honoring Wright’s name and legacy as an education leader and the first Black person elected countywide in Broward, which was no easy undertaking in 1974.
The district headquarters is one of the most desirable real estate locations in Broward County, south of the New River and just east of the county courthouse.
It’s a hot real estate market at the moment, and a big new federal courthouse is being built just a few blocks south.
Come to think of it, Fort Lauderdale needs a new City Hall.
At a workshop on school closings this week, school board member Allen Zeman floated the idea of selling the building.
The district is in a financial bind and needs money. Zeman said selling the building could fetch as much as $100 million.
“I am, at my very core DNA, opposed to government agencies working in glitzy buildings,” Zeman said. “We should be reminded every day we walk to our offices that classrooms are where our business gets done.”
Zeman said the school board and its staff should be headquartered in an “old school” that’s much closer to the geographic center of the county, which is closer to I-75 than it is to I-95.
He also said it’s a more appropriate tribute to Kathleen Wright for her name to be on a school campus where kids are learning, rather than a tower for district employees.
To say that selling the Crystal Palace is not a new idea is the Broward understatement of the decade.
Talk about kicking the can down the road: Former school board member Bob Parks proposed selling it in 1997, 27 years ago, but the idea did not gain traction back then.
“The building has been a perceived albatross around the school district’s neck,” Parks said then.
When Parks proposed selling the Palace a generation ago, the school district had a serious problem with too many students. Those drab portable classrooms were everywhere, and the district couldn’t build new schools fast enough.
The current problem is just the opposite: too few students.
The nation’s sixth-largest school district has an estimated 50,000 empty seats, the result of a declining birth rate and an exodus of students to private schools and charters, a trend greatly accelerated by the Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis.
State support of public schools is determined on a per-pupil basis. The fewer students a district has, the less state money it receives.
School board members were also reminded that any proceeds from selling the headquarters must be used for purchase or renovation of school buildings, not for most day-to-day operations.
As we have seen with the district’s badly executed “redefining” of schools, execution is everything. This board does not seem well-engineered for multi-tasking, and right now, it must concentrate on which schools to close or consolidate.
But it’s crystal clear that after 27 years, it’s time for Broward to consider unloading the Crystal Palace.
Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on X @stevebousquet.