Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Growth in the Sweet Home area will impact local schools, but School District 55 has enough land and facilities to handle up to 1,200 more students, according to Supt. Larry Horton.
“We continually are seeing new subdivision requests and are actually starting to see homes being built,” Horton said. That suggests an influx of students in coming years, something the district must plan for, he said.
While a number of subdivisions have been approved in the past, they have had little building activity, Horton said. This time it appears the subdivisions will become a reality so Horton said he contacted the district’s architect, Reid Anderson of gLAs Architecture, to take a look at district facilities.
The district is looking at .4 to 1.4 students per new household, Horton said. Albany uses the .4 figure while Sweet Home presently has 1.4 students per household in the School District, determined by dividing the number of students by the number of households.
The amount of student growth will probably fall between those two numbers, Horton said. At the low end, the approximately 800 buildable lots already in place will generate 320 new students. At the high end, Sweet Home could have 1,120 new students.
“That’s probably going to happen over a two- to three-year period,” Horton said. “We’d better start planning now so we don’t get caught short. I think we need to definitely make sure we know how much space we have.”
Horton and Anderson’s survey of district property answered the question of whether the district needs to buy more land, the biggest concern at this point, Horton said. It doesn’t.
“We could probably handle 300” with existing facilities, Horton said. “The 320 is probably doable, but of course a lot of that depends on where they are. That would be using every available classroom.”
Many of those classrooms are used for things like computer labs, Horton said. The district could create portable labs that can be rolled from one classroom to the next. “There are ways of gaining some of the space that’s currently being used.”
It also would require re-opening Pleasant Valley as a district school, Horton said. That facility is currently being leased by Little Promises preschool.
With the district’s available acreage, the district could accommodate 1,200 new students, Horton said. “We have the land, but we would need to build classrooms.”
To meet the maximum possible influx, the district would need a total of 48 classrooms built or reclaimed at 25 students per room.
If necessary, the district could build a new elementary school between the junior high and high school track, Horton said.
That same new building could be used as a junior high, and the old junior high could become an elementary school, depending on what the district needs.
The district could add another eight classrooms at Hawthorne, preserving all but the field shortened by the last expansion there. Pleasant Valley also has land available for new classrooms.
A bond could be used for construction, Horton said, but the district would need to do a thorough analysis before presenting it to voters. The district also could borrow money and pay the loan off like a regular home loan.
In California, development fees helped cover the cost of new schools, Horton said. Cities in Oregon can charge developers to help that way with infrastructure.
“I’m optimistically cautious” about growth, Horton said. “It’s a relief to be talking about growth instead of decline. I also think if we don’t plan for growth, it could be a horrible problem.”
Right now, the district will just wait and see what happens in September, Horton said.
He expects growth of about 35 new students in the next school year, similar to the current growth in the district. In his fourth year as superintendent, this is the first the district has grown, Horton said.
Horton said he doesn’t think the district will see 320 new students in one year.
“It’d be a challenge,” he said. “In the short term, we may need to purchase some portables.”