Group wants own school district

A small group of parents and other Liberty Lake residents is working on a plan to break away from the Central Valley School District.

The group wants the small municipality to push for the creation of its own school district, separating Liberty Lake children from the district that has more than 11,000 students.

“I think that it is worth going forward with, I don’t think that we have a choice,” said parent Cindy Morris.

Morris came to a community meeting last week organized by an informal group investigating the possibility of a new district.

Like many parents, Morris worries that because of rapid growth at Liberty Lake there won’t be enough room for her children at Liberty Lake Elementary School next year.

“CV doesn’t have a good long-term or short-term solution” to the crowding, Morris said. “We need to act now.”

The group believes that Liberty Lake has the economic base to support its own district, and that supporters could easily gather enough signatures to begin the process.

But according to the State Board of Education it would require more than a petition and the support of the majority of Liberty Lake citizens.

Under a 1993 interpretation of state law, written by an assistant attorney general, a new school district cannot be formed by the extraction of territory from an already existing school district. The opinion states that the “the law does not set out procedures for carrying out that kind of reorganization.”

“What they would have to do is change a statute, draft a bill and find a member of the House or Senate to sponsor it,” said Kate Lykins Brown, communications and legislative affairs manager for the state board.

But at the Liberty Lake meeting last week, the committee told about 20 residents in attendance that the state law is ambiguous, and that creating a new district can be done.

The law was rewritten in 1999, and the group believes that a new interpretation should be considered.

“We don’t know everything we need to know,” said Randy Grinalds, a committee member. “But the competition, meaning CV, has no new elementary planned in the Liberty Lake area, so how could we do worse than that?”

Grinalds is the primary cheerleader for the group. After writing an editorial in November in the Liberty Lake Splash, a weekly newspaper, about the possibility of a separate school district, Grinalds was contacted by several residents who support the idea. The group has been meeting for several weeks and gathering information.

The chief complaint from the committee centers on growth issues.

According to Lykins Brown, it has been more than 50 years since a school district was created in Washington, although several districts have consolidated.

“But can a single school district divide itself into two school districts? The answer is no, it cannot,” Lykins Brown said.

Central Valley Superintendent Mike Pearson said it is too early to make any assumptions about how the district would deal with the proposed separation, assuming Liberty Lake residents were able to change the law.

“They are free to pursue, that’s the bottom line,” Pearson said.

He said the Liberty Lake group has not contacted the district about their proposal. “Everything we’ve heard has been second-hand,” Pearson said.

Liberty Lake Elementary is the only Central Valley school within the city of Liberty Lake.

The district also owns 23 acres adjacent to the school. Central Valley voters rejected a bond to build a new middle school there in 2003.

Currently Central Valley is considering a facilities concept, which will go before the school board March 28 to address growth issues.

The district is gathering community input about the proposed plan that includes building two new schools over the next six to eight years.

Though nothing has been decided, the district has purchased property at Mission and Long as a possible new elementary school site. That acreage is west of Barker Road, about four miles from Liberty Lake, and on the opposite side of Interstate 90.

“That property is not in a location that serves Liberty Lake area,” Grinalds said. “They have no new elementary plan in the Liberty Lake area in the face of staggering growth.”