A new frontier at Fronteras

WASILLA — Students won’t slide or clamber for months, but the Fronteras Charter School officially has a playground.

The Spanish-language immersion school also has mostly finished classrooms, security cameras, an in-progress gymnasium, a warming kitchen, and a science and art rooms. The new facility, adjacent to the Mat-Su Day School along Tait Drive, has a button secretaries can push to lock the school down in the event of emergencies. In short, the U.S. Department of Agriculture-financed building looks a lot like an elementary school. Starting June 1, it will even have teachers working to get classrooms ready for the Aug. 15 start of the school year, said principal Jennifer Schmidt-Hutchins.

“We are setting up our classrooms, setting up offices, you bet,” she said. “There is going to be a lot of work, there has already been.”

The school has pushed since 2010 to obtain a new building to replace its current location at the intersection of Bogard Road and Keith Street, which it currently rents from Northgate Church. Part of the appeal of a new building — apart from her own office painted in a vibrant lime-green — is that all of the Fronteras facilities will be under one roof, Schmidt-Hutchins said. At the current space, which was originally designed to be a church, students had to travel between buildings for physical education.

“We are all in one room,” she said. “No 5-year-olds walking across a blowing campus anymore.”

The school relies heavily on volunteers to accomplish educational objectives, Schmidt-Hutchins said. For example, because parents drive their children to school, the number of buses bound for Fronteras is much smaller than other schools.

For example, Chris Whittington-Evans still sometimes serves as a volunteer janitor.

Whittington-Evans is an architect by trade, and worked with school staff and the academic policy committee — the name for the school’s governing board — to find a path forward once the school obtained a charter.

“We started looking at options for whether we were going to be able to expand building on our current site, whether we were going to change and occupy another leased space with a private landowner, or whether we were going to be fortunate enough to get into a publicly owned school,” Whittington-Evans said.

A borough ordinance in 2009 laid out criteria for charter schools to be eligible for a borough building. Charter schools have to survive more than five years to meet the borough’s viability test to be eligible for a building.

“Ours is the first manifestation of that borough ordinance,” he said.

The school’s funding mechanism is unique among local schools, most of which are funded via bonds. The $6.9-million Fronteras building was constructed using a loan from the USDA guaranteed by the borough. The loan is based on a 30-year note with 3.25 percent interest. The installment payments for the loan come out of the school’s regular funding, which is funded like other public schools, based on enrollment, Whittington-Evans said. In the worst-case scenario — a default on the loan — the USDA would either take possession of the almost-finished building, or work with the borough to find another tenant for the building, Whittington-Evans said. When the loan is completed, the building will become Mat-Su Borough property, Whittington-Evans said.

The funding model means some reduction in the percentage of school funds used for instruction during the term of the loan. The facility payments amount to 15 percent of the schools operating budget, Whittington-Evans said. That’s roughly the same amount the school previously paid to rent the building from the church, Whittington-Evans said.

“We do that right now anyway, it’s just that it doesn’t go into the public coffers or towards a public asset,” he said. “So in a sense, we’re doing a benefit to the borough and to the district by at least paying off a public asset that is for the education of public school students.”

Because of the financing mechanism and the method of construction, the new Fronteras building focuses on efficiency, Whittington-Evans said. That allowed officials to build 31,000 square feet of school for about $7 million, Whittington-Evans said.

“We designed it to be economical,” he said. “We also don’t have, in the same way that some of the neighborhood schools have really large common spaces and areas, our spaces are a little more efficient than what a typical neighborhood school would be designed for.”

Of course, facts and figures struggle to compete with new carpet smell and fresh paint. Schmidt-Hutchins was exuberant when she stepped into the room that will become her new office. One wall is painted an eye-catching green designed to mimic the color of birch tree buds, and the desk will face it, Schmidt-Hutchins said.

“It’s my favorite color and I wanted something bright and cheery every day that I’m here,” she said. “My desk is there, and I want to look at that.”

Contact reporter Brian O’Connor at 352-2270, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Chris Whittington-Evans' last name.