VISTA -- Its sewer pipes are rotting. Its roofs are leaking. Some of its buildings are plagued by rats, asbestos and mold.

But still, some Vista Unified School District officials think at least portions of Lincoln Middle School are salvageable.

The nearly 70-year-old campus is expected to be vacant in January when its 1,300 students begin attending Rancho Minerva Middle School, which is expected to be completed this year in a rural area about two miles east of where Lincoln now stands.

District staff and school board members have different ideas of how to utilize the property and what part of the campus, if any, will be usable.

However, most agree that the infrastructure of the school -- including crumbling sewer and gas lines -- will require some serious work repairs.

"I think we clearly need to change the infrastructure," said Trustee Stephen Guffanti. "It wasn't designed to last that long, and it's time to replace it."

Trustees consider rebuilding

All of the board members agreed that some sort of work needs to be done on the aging campus.

Trustee David Hubbard said he thinks some of he buildings could be saved, depending on how they were going to be utilized. However, he said that he thinks bulldozing the entire campus, selling part of the land and building a smaller school would probably make the most sense.

"We can't just keep throwing money at it," he said. "It needs to be redeveloped and given new bones, so to speak."

Board Vice President Jim Gibson agreed about redeveloping, and said he doesn't think any of the buildings are worth saving.

"It's sort of like throwing good money after bad," he said about continuing to pay to maintain the aging campus. "It's not a very wise use of resources."

On the other hand, board President Carol Herrera said she thinks the campus is still safe and usable even though it has been beaten up through the years.

"We just need to take some of those relocatable off of that campus, get the structure back to a workable condition," she said.

Lilly agreed that the district could still house students in the weathered classrooms, but only temporarily.

"If Rancho Minerva weren't opening, we would have kids in Lincoln this January," he said. "So it's not a situation of we absolutely can't use it."

However, he said that he didn't think any part of the campus was usable for anything long term without repairing the infrastructure.

Trustees have said they would like to keep the sports fields on the corner of Escondido and Eucalyptus avenues where they are for community use.

"To take away the sports fields in the center of town, that's not very nice." Guffanti said. "It's for the community."

Crumbling classrooms

Amy Williams, president of Lincoln's parent teacher association, said she doesn't think some of the school board trustees understand how run-down the campus actually is.

"For these guys to really understand what they're dealing with, they need to take a tour of the campus," she said, adding that the school is "less than desirable for habitation."

As a parent of a student at the campus, Williams said she worries about the health of the children who have to sit in classrooms with mold, asbestos, rat feces and leaky roofs.

"Some people are really allergic to stuff like that," she said. "It's definitely a concern."

The campus is a maintenance nightmare and money pit, said Bill Beeson, the only plumber in the district's maintenance department.

In the long run, it would cost the district much more money to refurbish and maintain the existing campus than it would to tear it down and start from scratch, Beeson said. Parts of the campus are nearly 70 years old.

"If you're a construction worker and you look at Lincoln, it's a no-brainer to tear it to the ground," he said. "All we're doing is putting a Band Aid on something that needs to be torn down."

Beeson, who has been a plumber for more than 20 years, said he thinks the biggest problem the district is facing with the campus is its crumbling sewer system, which he said is "rotted to full extreme."

The gas lines, roofs and wooden structures on the campus are also in bad shape, he said.

"The termites own more of the school than the school district does," he said. "Why put more money into something that the wood structure has been eaten away by termites for the last 70 years?"

Williams lawsuit

Beeson said he thinks the Lincoln campus is the most rundown in the district. However, he said the buildings and infrastructure at several other schools are nearly as bad.

He said he thinks Olive Elementary School and Washington Middle School should be torn down and rebuilt as well.

"All of those older schools are in the same situation," he said. "Every single one. They're all in the same boat."

The district has spent millions of dollars modernizing and remolding older schools with money from the $140 million bond passed by voters in 2002. Between 2002 and 2005, the district spent more than $250,000 to modernize Lincoln's campus, according to district figures.

Most of these improvements have been superficial and have not focused on aging infrastructure, Beeson said.

"All they care about is what they see," he said about district staff.

In addition to these improvements, the district has been mandated in the 2004 settlement of a lawsuit to pay for at least $8 million worth of repairs for Lincoln and Olive.

The American Civil Liberties Union named the district in the lawsuit, which it filed in 2000 against the state on behalf of poor students in 18 school districts across the state. The Williams v. California suit alleged that underprivileged students were, among other complaints, attending rundown schools.

The improvements haven't been mandated by the state, which would likely pay for much of the repairs.

Even if the district can legally put students into the buildings without repairing or rebuilding them, which is in question, Hubbard said he would not feel comfortable doing so.

"I'm just not real comfortable about putting kids into a school site where we know there are some significant infrastructure problems," he said.

Contact staff writer Stacy Brandt at (760) 631-6622 or sbrandt@nctimes.com.