Redington Jr./Sr. High School it is

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough School Board decided Wednesday night to stick with its already-agreed-upon name for a new high school soon to be built in the Knik area.

According to a brief note from the meeting posted to the district’s website, the board decided to name the school Joe Redington Jr./Sr. High School and to name a future elementary school in the area Dena’ina Elementary School.

Redington was a Knik resident and famous dog musher, usually referred to as the “Father of the Iditarod.” Dena’ina is the term indigenous people in the area use to refer to themselves.

The two names were finalists for the junior/senior high school during the naming process. A district poll elicited more support for Redington than Dena’ina, 57 percent to 43 percent. But then the Knik Tribal Council sat down with Mat-Su Borough School District Superintendent Deena Paramo and asked her to reconsider.

Paramo put a measure changing the name before the board on Wednesday, asking it to consider naming the high school after the Dena’ina people and the elementary school for Redington. The board declined to go back on its decision to accept the winner of the poll.

The school, which will be finished in about two years, was also the subject of a presentation from Gary Wolf with Wolf Architecture at Tuesday’s Mat-Su Borough Assembly meeting. Wolf told the assembly that $16 million of the project’s $65.4 million cost would be spent on things that aren’t the building.

“It’s a big number,” Wolf said.

That includes work preparing the site, parking lots, a track, bleachers and a turf field.

He said the site is challenging with slopes inappropriate for school buses on 103 acres, with half of that wetlands.

The plan is to have middle school downstairs and high school upstairs. Eventually, a second school will be built on that same 103 acres and the middle and high schools will be separate.

“It’s in Knik and we wanted the school to be a good community center for the Knik area and we designed it to be that,” Wolf said.

Wolf said the building will be certified LEED silver or better, meaning that it will be very energy efficient.

As far as timelines go, he said, the project would seek permitting in February and bid in March, then spend 15 months under construction.

“We’ve done a lot, we have a lot to do,” Wolf said.

The school is one of a number of schools with access problems that have been roped together into a $16.2 million package of bonds that will go before the voters Oct. 1.

Assemblyman Vern Halter asked Wolf what happens if voters shoot down those bonds.

“We can access the site on Dagg (Drive),” Wolf said. “It’s a paved road, it’s a good road.”

And part of the plan for building the second school includes adding another access from the north.

Assemblyman Ron Arvin pointed out that right now the borough is contending with substandard access to an elementary school, Machetanz Elementary, traffic for that often flows through a nearby subdivision, irritating neighbors. Wolf answered that the situation on Dagg isn’t quite the same.

“It’s just not as big a neighborhood,” he said.

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