NExA moving to new school site

By BRIAN WALKER

Staff Writer

COEUR d’ALENE — The Northwest Expedition Academy will have a new home.

The Coeur d’Alene School board unanimously voted on Monday night to move the K-5 public school, referred to as NExA, to the Prairie Avenue site that the district purchased last year.

NExA is more than halfway through its second year. It took over the historic Hayden Lake School at 9650 N. Government Way with its project-based learning approach and has 315 students.

The new 52,000-square-foot school will be built at the 7-acre site across from Chomper Cafe and open there in fall of 2020. The school’s existing 32,000-square-foot facility built in 1936 lacks adequate space, according to school officials.

Principal Bill Rutherford said many of his school’s staff and parents were OK with any of the four improvement options that district staff presented to the board. He’s just thankful that a future path has finally been determined.

“We were good either way because overcrowding is a big problem,” he said. “Parents mostly want to make sure that project-based learning is maintained. I really believe our community just wanted an answer.”

The school will be funded with a $12.5 million bond that was passed two years ago.

The board’s decision includes a grandfather clause for students who are currently enrolled at the school, so they won’t be affected by the boundary rezoning that will occur this summer. Students who are not grandfathered in and live outside the future school boundary will need their own transportation to the school, Rutherford said.

Board members didn’t see the update-and-repair option of the existing facility, estimated to cost $3.4 million, as a viable option.

“I am not putting lipstick on a pig,” Tom Hearn said, adding that he was “appalled” after visiting the school and seeing staff work in a storage room. “I don’t think that’s a good use of taxpayer money.”

A remodel-and-additions option that would have connected buildings, added classrooms and a gym and expanded or relocated the cafeteria was estimated to cost between $8.6 million and $8.75 million.

A fourth option was to build a new school on the existing property and consider a land swap with the city of Hayden to increase the site size from 5.5 acres to 6.28 acres. That option was estimated to cost between $12 million and $12.5 million.

Steve Casey, whose family has been part of the district for 42 years, said NExA has proven it provides a warm and caring environment for students and it needs a new site.

“The current site is too small to add onto,” he said, adding that a remodel is not cost-effective.

Moving NExA to the Prairie site was also the district staff’s recommendation.

“We want to be clear that facility challenges are a district challenge and not a NExA challenge,” said Jeff Voeller, the district’s director of operations.

Board member Jennifer Brumley said long-range facility planning, including for the district’s 40-acre site, needs to be an immediate high priority due to other schools feeling growth pressures.

“We’re only a couple years out from a huge ask of telling (residents) what we need and how much it’s going to cost us,” she said. “I want a plan, and I want it sooner rather than later.”

The board also agreed to consider increasing staffing levels at NExA during the upcoming budget process.

Kate Orozco, elementary education director, said the recommendations include:

- increasing the librarian position by .3 full-time equivalent (FTE), giving the school one full-time librarian;

- increasing the special education teaching staffing by 1.0 FTE;

- increasing the administrative allocation by .5 FTE to make the school similar to other elementaries; and

- filling the Title teacher position with the additional .5 FTE, giving the school a full-time Title teacher.

When the school opened in 2017, it was not realized that the NExA community would be at the Hayden site for more than a year or that so many families would be coping with difficult financial circumstances, Orozco wrote in a memo to the board.

“Both of those conditions have led us to make staffing recommendations for the school, which will equip the staff to better meet the needs of its children,” Orozco wrote.

She said the staffing recommendations are based on comparing NExA to schools of similar size as well as with schools with populations of similar socioeconomic status.