Lakeside Overcrowding Has School Board Concerned
Overcrowding at Lakeside High School has increased class sizes, limited teaching space and forced the district to spend at least $50,000 on portables just five years after the school was built.
And a building spree in Suncrest and the Nine Mile area is likely to put even more pressure on a building so short on teaching space that the staff lounge and counseling centers have been turned into classrooms.
“We aren’t starting to be concerned - we have been concerned for several years,” said Nine Mile Falls school board president Jan Johnston.
A maintenance and operations levy approved Feb. 6 included money for portables, which administrators view as a temporary solution. Superintendent Don Baumberger said he would meet with a planning committee in March to decide how many portable classrooms would be placed at the school and when they would go up. Each portable costs $46,000 and the district must spend about $5,000 more for site preparation and utility hook-ups.
A long-term solution - building a new middle school - is not on the school board’s agenda. Residents of the Nine Mile area, who are still paying off the bonds for Lakeside’s construction, have traditionally opposed increases in property taxes.
“You can shoot for the moon, but if people don’t approve it, it doesn’t matter,” Johnston said.
Lakeside, which houses both the high school and middle school, was opened in 1990 and designed for no more than 540 students. This year, enrollment is 650.
“There simply aren’t any empty classrooms at Lakeside,” Baumberger said.
The classroom crunch can be traced to a money-saving decision to eliminate eight classrooms in the final stage of construction design. Administrators were forced to cut the classrooms, Lakeside principal Larry Guenther said, because construction bids for the $6.32 million school were higher than expected.
As a result of the enrollment increase, Lakeside administrative offices have been turned into teaching areas. Students trapse through the main office, past the staff bathrooms, to class in what was supposed to be the staff lounge. The room is still equipped with a refrigerator and dishwasher.
In the counseling center, four desks are crammed into an area meant for one person. Eight part- and full-time staff - from the special education director to the drug and alcohol counselor to the school psychologist - share a single office because an adjacent office has been turned into a classroom.
Records librarian Lois Foster sees a parade of students and staff through the counseling office. “We know who is always late,” she said with a laugh.
Ironically, students don’t have a hard time getting to their classes because the wide hallways and large common areas were kept intact. The spacious library has a vaulted ceiling and lots of study tables.
Guenther likes the open space, even if it comes at the expense of classrooms. “This is a blessing,” he said. “It would be worse if we didn’t have this.”
The district is expected to continue growing. The class of 1996 is about 80 students; the seventh-grade class replacing those seniors has 130. The district projects another 150 students by the year 2000.
According to the Stevens County Planning Department, 300 lots have been platted in Suncrest alone, and developments in northwest Spokane County will likely add at least 50 more homes.
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