JH board reviewing bond issue for new addition

The Jackson Heights USD 335 Board of Education is looking at building a new addition to the elementary school that will add nine new classrooms and require moving some existing offices and library space around to handle recent — and predicted — student growth.

But with property assessment valuations rising in the district, along with the transfer of about 90 square miles of land to the district from Prairie Hills USD 113, the board recognized that it will have to, as board president David Allen put it, explain a possible bond issue “to a point where people understand it and are willing to support it.”

That possible bond issue, as board members noted during their regular monthly meeting, could give the district about $5 million in funds for the construction of an elementary school addition that will handle about 100 additional students who came to the district last year after Prairie Hills officials closed Wetmore Attendance Center early in 2023.

The addition will also link the elementary school building with the middle and high school, which saw a 20-year, $3 million bond issue for its own expansion approved by district patrons at a 2007 election and paid off about six years ahead of schedule.

District Superintendent Jim Howard and Middle and High School Principal Derek Smith presented board members with draft plans for a building addition that, as board members noted during strategic planning discussions held at a special July 18 meeting, would serve the district better than a new gym or an upgrade to the existing elementary gym.

Those draft plans, Howard told board members, included a common “library” space, new classrooms that would allow fifth and sixth-grade classes to move out of the existing elementary building — allowing kindergarten through fourth grades to have three classrooms per grade — and new spaces for art and music, as well as a possible remodel of elementary classroom space for a new office near the building’s main entrance.

The addition, Allen noted, would cover about 17,000 square feet, and at an estimated cost of $300 per square foot, the total cost would fall within a $5 million range that board members had previously found favorable for a bond issue. The real challenge, he added, would involve explaining to district patrons “why and how we have to build new classrooms and not refurbish the basement” at the high school.

Board member David Holliday agreed, adding that any building expansions would have to provide “a balance between building it big enough to address current needs and having a little bit of room and flexibility… You don’t want to go ahead and build it, and then five years down the road, you have to do something again.”

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