In a public hearing lasting all of six minutes, visiting judge Robert Fairchild heard opening gambits Tuesday morning in a case concerning the alliance between the Iola school district and the Bowlus Fine Arts Center. The hearing was a chance for beneficiaries of the center to enter objections to a recent court petition issued by the school district. One minute into the proceedings, Judge Fairchild called for Fred Works to address the court: “You have filed objections [to the petition]?” asked the judge. “That’s right,” said the local attorney and former Bowlus Commission chairman, rising from his seat in the gallery. And so, explained Works, has Community Bank & Trust president Jim Gilpin, who was unable to attend Tuesday’s hearing because of a work conflict.
Late last summer, members of the USD 257 Board of Education directed attorneys from Johnson Schowengerdt P.A. to file a petition asking the court to examine the extent of the district’s obligations to the fine arts center as they were originally set down in the will of Iola philanthropist Thomas H. Bowlus 55 years prior. Board members, who also serve as trustees of the center, are requesting a legal review of Bowlus’s will and charitable trust, whose benefaction paid for the fine arts center’s construction in the early 1960s, established an endowment for the conservation of the center, and — the crucial point in question — ascribed responsibilities to USD 257 intended to guide their stewardship of the Bowlus Fine Arts Center for the length of its existence.
What are the precise limits of those responsibilities, the district wants to know. And how elastic are the interpretations of the will given the inability of its author to foresee the changed environment wrought by a half-century, especially if the obligations of the will chance to threaten a school district’s budgetary health. A full menu of the questions the district is asking the court to review appeared in Saturday’s Iola Register.
Fairchild set an April 30 date for Works and Gilpin to file their briefs. Johnson Schowengerdt P.A. has until May 12 to respond, if so inclined. Fairchild then selected a hearing date of 10 a.m., May 24, when it will be determined whether Works and Gilpin have standing.
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