Hail crashes school groundbreaking
Thunder roared overhead shortly after Post Falls schools Superintendent Jerry Keane welcomed guests to a groundbreaking ceremony for a new elementary school Tuesday.
Drizzle soon turned to hail, and city and school officials huddled by a school bus filled with the Ponderosa Elementary School choir as quarter-sized balls of ice rained down on the future site of West Ridge Elementary School. Some retreated inside the bus and waited out the weather.
“We stepped off and had a very quick ending ceremony,” said Becky Ford, assistant superintendent. “This was definitely a groundbreaking to remember.”
The district’s fifth elementary school, near the corner of Seltice Way and Empire Center Boulevard, is scheduled to open in fall 2008. It will hold 500 students.
A $10.9 million levy approved by voters last year funds the $8 million needed for construction. The levy also is paying for eight additional classrooms being built at Post Falls High School and, later this year, a remodel of the district bus facility.
West Ridge isn’t the only new school preparing to open. Twin Lakes Elementary in the Lakeland School District is ahead of schedule and should be ready for the fall, said Ron Schmidt, assistant superintendent of the district.
Three hundred students are expected to open Twin Lakes, located near the intersection of Highway 41 and Rice Road. A $14.2 million levy passed in 2005 funds the construction of the school, as well as a $6.3 million expansion and remodel at Lakeland High School.
Other projects in the area – an expanded lunchroom at Garwood Elementary School, a new entry way at Spirit Lake Elementary – were completed last summer.
The expansion at Lakeland High includes 10 new classrooms, which Schmidt said should be completed by the fall. Expansions to the gymnasium will be done in December.
The new classrooms will enable ninth-graders to attend the high school rather than the junior high across the street.
Once those projects are finished, the district will be caught up on building needs, Schmidt said.
Post Falls and Lakeland are the only North Idaho districts with major construction projects in the works. Voters last week rejected a bond proposed by the West Bonner School District to build an elementary school in Blanchard, remodel Priest River Junior High and expand other schools.
Coeur d’Alene voters rejected a levy last year that would have rebuilt or remodeled three schools – Lakes Middle School and Borah and Winton elementary schools – and built a new elementary school.
Last October, voters in the Lake Pend Oreille School District rejected a levy to remodel Kootenai Elementary School.