NAMPA, Idaho — The Nampa School District has proposed closing and/or repurposing existing schools to its board to better distribute students.
- The average capacity of the Nampa School District is 68%, with some schools being as low as 50% capacity.
- The fiscal strategy would make new boundaries, mitigate renovation costs, and reallocate students and staff.
(Below is the transcript from the broadcast story)
The Nampa School District has put forth a proposal recommendation to the school board of trustees to consolidate buildings. Specifically to close three buildings, and reallocating three others.
Schools that could possibly close include Central, Snake River, West Middle, and either Greenhurst or Centennial.
Snake River, West, and Central buildings will all be repurposed to accommodate these school closures.
NOVA, Gateways, Nampa Academy, and the District's preschool program would be moved into the repurposed Snake River, West, and Central buildings.
"Central would then become home to NOVA [online] and our pre-school. Snake River would be home to the Gateways program, West would become Union and our Nampa Academy. Other buildings that would be vacated would be razed."
All this despite the growth in the city.
"This does not come as a huge shock to us because we did have experts go out and look at what lay in store for us and their report showed that this was going to happen and we pretty much followed that graph just as it was presented back in 2018."
The District recommending schools be consolidated could be a fiscally responsible move not only because of the amount of schools being operated but also because of the age and state of the buildings themselves. Some of these buildings have been grandfathered into previous Idaho building codes. Should the District want or need to renovate or repurpose by adding even one room, the entire building would need to be brought up to modern code.
"...there are some things that need to be upgraded in those and once you get in and start doing that laws kick in that maybe some things that you didn't have to do you now have to do because you're in there renovating so costs can rise really, really quickly. "
The students in Central, West, and Snake River would be spread out to the remaining schools through a re-boundary process that Tuck says would also benefit their student's curriculum.
"We have a lot of schools that are nowhere near capacity, maybe 50, 60%, that's not optimal to have that too many of those schools. Be reducing those schools, for instance, elementary taking it from 14 down to 11 is going to allow us to do a better of job of providing the programming that we want to do in the way that we want to do it so that we're not having to duplicate programming at a lot of different elementary schools."
The district, by combining all the schools together, sits at an average of 68% capacity in a single building with no single building at 100%, or even greater, capacity. Tuck says that the target capacity for a building is 80%.
Fewer buildings means fewer classrooms. Fewer classrooms also means fewer teachers. The District realizes the anxiety around the unknowns for teachers but are optimistic.
"We'll have a need for less staff. What we're hoping is that through attrition, people moving or retiring or choosing other paths, that we will be able to absorb everybody. There are of course no guarantees but we really hope to keep everybody and find a new place for them."
