A campaign for YS Schools
- Published: January 15, 2026
On Tuesday, Dec. 2 — Giving Tuesday — YS Schools officially launched its capital campaign, which aims to raise funds for some aspects of the facilities upgrades project currently underway at Mills Lawn and Yellow Springs Middle and High School.
The following week, at the school board’s regular meeting on Thursday, Dec. 11, Superintendent Terri Holden addressed questions and concerns about the capital campaign. By that point, discussion about the campaign had already spread on social media; some community members expressed surprise that the district was pursuing a capital campaign at all, alongside the bond issue and income tax levy voters approved in November 2023 to fund the $55 million facilities upgrades project.
Holden said at the meeting, and in an interview with the News this week, that the capital campaign wasn’t unanticipated for the district, but grew out of years of planning around how to fund the project. Holden had previously indicated, at a Feb. 12 school board meeting preceding the project’s groundbreaking, that a capital campaign would likely be necessary to support items not covered through state or levy funding.
The 2023 bond issue and income tax levy passed in 2023 after failed levies in 2018 and 2021, and after the formation of more than one facilities committee tasked with exploring options to update the aging facilities. As the News has reported in the past, the district held a number of work sessions and community meetings to determine whether to pursue a single K–12 building, which is typically co-funded by the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission, or OFCC, or to preserve two campuses.
The district ultimately moved forward with a phased, two-building plan that retained Mills Lawn as an elementary school and opened space to bring in a pre-K program, while consolidating grades five through 12 at the East Enon Road campus. The OFCC approved the phased approach and will provide a 27% rebate through its Expedited Local Partnership Program, or ELPP, upon the facilities project’s completion. However, as the News reported in 2023, only the East Enon Road construction is eligible for the reimbursement from the OFCC.
“So even with the 27% ELPP credit, none of the work at Mills Lawn is eligible for that credit,” Holden said this week.
Once construction began, Holden said, additional expenses emerged, particularly at Mills Lawn, that were not anticipated until crews began opening walls and addressing aging infrastructure. She said these expenses did not push the overall project beyond its approved construction budget, but instead affected how locally funded items could be prioritized.
“When you’re renovating a 73-year-old building, you don’t know what to expect,” Holden said. “So as we’ve gone along, there have been some decisions that we have had to make that we didn’t know about beforehand.”
She cited issues such as relocating a drain pipe that was not where crews expected it to be, and needing to replace, rather than repair as expected, a layered concrete walkway at Mills Lawn’s main entrance. She also noted that, though the district had planned to renovate the existing kitchen at Mills Lawn, they made the decision to install a new kitchen in part to resolve a bottleneck in the hallway outside the kitchen, where students previously lined up to be served.
“We wanted to make sure the hallway was clear so that they actually enter the kitchen to go through the line,” Holden said. “So we said, ‘This is important; this has to be done.’”
Holden said interest earned from high-yield, short-term notes has helped the district absorb some unanticipated costs while remaining within its construction budget. However, she said, using those funds to address unexpected needs reduced the amount available for other locally funded items that the state does not reimburse.
As a result, Holden said, the largest portion of the capital campaign will fund additions to the new auditorium at the East Enon Road campus, including retractable seating and theater rigging, lighting and audio equipment, which will cost around $1.2 million.
“We know the state never pays for auditorium seats,” Holden said. “We knew we were going to have to pay for that ourselves.”
Other locally funded enhancements to the facilities project included in the capital campaign are a video scoreboard for the new high school gym; an electronic “Wall of Fame” board for the high school; an expanded memorial garden at the middle and high schools; playground equipment for Mills Lawn; a stage curtain and audio equipment for the Mills Lawn gym; an outdoor learning area at Mills Lawn; and LED signs at each campus.
In exchange for giving toward the capital campaign, donors are offered naming opportunities for some aspects of the updated campuses, including one of the 347 auditorium seats for a minimum donation of $1,000, individual classrooms for donations of $25,000 and gyms at both campuses for $250,000–$500,000, among others.
Holden noted that participation in the campaign is voluntary and that fundraising will not reduce the overall cost of the levy-funded portion of the facilities project.
Assistant Superintendent Megan Winston said the campaign was designed to allow folks to give, if they so choose, at a number of levels. She noted that larger-ticket naming opportunities might appeal more to large organizations, but that the auditorium seats or the donor wall planned for the new gymnasium’s John W. Gudgel Court might appeal more to families, graduating classes or groups of friends.
“There are possibilities for people to come together as a group,” Winston said. “People could combine finances to buy an auditorium seat or to name the garden at Mills Lawn.”
“Most people want to do it to honor somebody, their family, somebody who’s meant something to them,” Holden added, though she noted that all naming opportunities are governed by existing board policy.
“The board has to approve the naming, and it has to align with the district’s values,” she said. “There is a process in place.”
Holden said district leaders tour the in-progress construction and renovation sites every two weeks, and hope to offer similar construction tours to the general public as well, pending a go-ahead from the project’s construction firm, which has cited safety and liability concerns. But seeing the renovations and new construction develop, week by week, is exciting for the district, she said.
“The amount of change we see every two weeks is just incredible,” she said.
With that in mind, she said she believes the updated facilities, when they’re finished, will be “the center of the community,” and that ultimately, it’s the district’s students who will benefit most from the capital campaign.
“We’ve been working on this for two years,” she said. “We hope that people understand and want to support the schools.”
For more information on the schools’ capital campaign, go to ysschools.org/capital-campaign. For updates on the progress of the facilities project, go to ysschools.org/construction.
Contact: chuck@ysnews.com
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