District to begin land acquisition for 3 new schools

PALMER — Over the course of the next year, the borough plans to pick out and purchase land for three new schools.

“It’s staff’s goal to be able to complete our process for acquisition on these sites sometime within this next calendar year,” Eileen Probasco, the borough’s chief of planning, said at a joint meeting of the assembly and school board this past week.

Those three sites are at the top of the district’s list for school buildings. One would be a permanent home for the Mat-Su Day School, which is currently housed mostly in portable classrooms. Another is a replacement for Iditarod Elementary, whose current building the district has deemed inadequate. Third is a new junior-senior high school.

Probasco said the borough anticipates the junior-senior high school will be built somewhere in the Knik-Goose Bay area, but there is an ongoing effort to gather more information and see if that is, indeed, the right place to put it.

Toward that, the school district brought in a consultant to track population trends, economic data, road construction and anything that will help the borough understand where its growth spots are and provide a clearer picture of where things here are headed.

Most assembly and school board members who spoke about the new data expressed excitement.

“Under this method, the school site committee, I could see, would fit into an overall plan and not be an independent entity just out there acquisitioning property,” said board member Ole Larson. “What happens if we pick the site from this committee and say, ‘yeah that’s what we want, and in reality … it’s not even in the right area, but by god we’ve got the land for it.’”

Schools superintendent Ken Burnley said the district is actually behind schedule when it comes to school construction.

“We literally have 81 portable classrooms with students in them,” he said. “Part of this will be long-range planning for the borough, all of us, how do we want to catch up?”

Assemblyman Mark Ewing had a lot to say about two of those schools. First, he brought up overcrowding at Wasilla High School, which moved into a discussion of how many WHS students are there because they received what’s called a “boundary exemption” to allow them to attend a school other than the one to which they are assigned.

“I know that the school district is working on making some of the schools more attractive to students, and certainly I think that’s a key,” Assemblywoman Cindy Bettine said. She said the district might be able to delay construction for a couple of years if students were required to attend the schools to which they are assigned.

Burnley said that in his experience managing transitions in other districts, boundary exemptions are a major factor. Parents affected by boundary changes when new schools come online or the district redraws the lines tend not to look favorably on other parents who have been exempted from the rules.

“It has to be a very tight process or else everything doesn’t work,” Burnley said.

As for Iditarod Elementary, Ewing had concerns there, too.

“Wasilla has always had an elementary school in downtown,” Ewing said. “We want to keep that type of community intact.”

School board member Sarah Welton said that in her eight years on the school board, Iditarod has been a problem the whole time.

“From the time I got on the school board I got complaints that the school was falling apart,” she said. “It would cost more to refurbish Iditarod than to build a new school. There are some things if we get money from the state; the 70-30, there’s issues with turning it into another school.”

She also noted that from the start the school site selection committee had been tasked with coming up with a replacement site within city limits. Bettine, a member of that committee, noted there are costs associated with that; land downtown is pricier than it would be on the outskirts.

With two Wasilla schools in the discussion, it probably wasn’t surprising that Wasilla Mayor Verne Rupright appeared at the meeting asking to be on the school site selection committee. That committee is made up of school board members and one at-large member. There doesn’t really seem to be a spot for Rupright, but at least one assembly member said she hoped there would be a way to make room.

“I’m excited that he’s excited about it,” Lynn Gattis said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.