Five Mile Prairie to get new school

So many people have moved onto the Five Mile Prairie in North Spokane that there wasn’t room for a new school in an ideal location.

Mead School District had the money, but it wasn’t clear where the needed elementary school would be located.

Now the district is plunging ahead with the project after the district in November settled on a 20-acre site it owns in the Five Mile Prairie area, but not exactly where it would have preferred to build.

Mead school officials had wanted to put their new elementary school in the center of their district. That way, the planned eighth elementary school would be most efficient in providing relief for the other schools that are struggling with full buildings. The biggest growth in the past few years had been seen on the north and south boundaries of the district located in north Spokane.

However, most of the usable plots of land were already spoken for by developers, said Mead superintendent Steven Enoch.

“Parcels that met our needs were already platted for homes,” Enoch said.

The new school will be built on Johannsen Road near the Five Mile Road intersection in the south section of the district within the boundaries of Evergreen Elementary.

As a result of the new school, several elementary attendance boundary lines will eventually be shifted to ensure all schools receive some relief from the increasing number of students, Enoch said.

As of December, four Mead elementary schools had more than 600 students, including Midway in the north part of the district with 666 students and Evergreen in the south with 653. Mead strives to keep student populations at 600 and less.

In the last two years, the district has seen spikes in grade-school student populations. The most recent head count is nearing 9,000 students.

The district currently shuttles 52 elementary students to schools outside of their areas because of overcrowding.

Adding the school will likely add about $600,000 in costs to the annual budget for building maintenance and additional staff, Enoch said.

The elementary school, which is still unnamed, will be 55,000 square feet and have a construction cost of $8.3 million. It should be ready for students in the fall of 2007, said John Dormaier, Mead director of facilities and planning.

The elementary school is one of two flagship projects that will be funded with the 2004 $37.7 million capital bond. The other project is a middle school that will replace Mead Middle School, a 1927 structure that began as the original Mead High School. Construction costs for the 110,000 square foot building will be almost $18.2 million. It should be ready for students by the fall of 2008. That school will be built north of Day-Mt. Spokane Road, south of Green Bluff Road near the Colbert Elementary School.

Dormaier joined the district in 1991. Back then Five Mile Prairie was more rural, he said. The district tracked population changes and expected gradual increases in student population on the Prairie. As interest rates dropped and most homes in the Spokane core became occupied, more people were drawn to the residential area near the city, Dormaier said.

In the next several months committees will be formed to weigh in on school design, boundary lines and even the school’s name.

At this point, none of the Mead schools are named after any one person, Enoch said and added, “I would guess that they would maintain that.”