Mead Tackles Crowding At Lower Grades

Just weeks after the Mead School District resolved attendance boundaries for Mount Spokane High School, administrators are turning their attention to crowding problems at the district’s three northernmost elementary schools - Colbert, Midway and Meadow Ridge.

In the past five years, an influx of students from new housing developments has jammed the schools. Some class sizes have increased and music lessons are being held on auditorium stages.

Colbert and Midway, each with portables, are near their 700-student capacity. Opened just three years ago, Meadow Ridge is already at capacity.

With more growth in the area expected - such as the proposed expansion of the Blackhawk housing development - the school populations are expected to swell even more.

“Those are the three schools that have grown the most,” said business director Al Swanson. “We know … we will outgrow the capacity of those schools to house students.”

Beginning next September, a 25-person committee of community residents will study the problem as it looks at the district’s future building needs. The study will likely be completed by June 1997.

Swanson said some short-term remedies are inevitable. Options for the committee include busing students, changing classes used by gifted programs into regular classrooms and adding more portables. He said the committee, headed by parent Kathleen Perks, also would have to consider recommending construction of a new elementary or middle school.

The committee may also have to consider redrawing school boundaries to ease pressure on the three northernmost elementary schools, Swanson said.

“We want to resist changing boundaries as much as possible,” said Swanson. “When we do these boundaries, we try to make them last … At some point, it will have to be done.”

Colbert principal Conn Wittwer said his school would be overcrowded if just 50 more students attended the school.

, DataTimes