USD 335 seeking land transfer "settlement proposal"

School officials at Jackson Heights and two other area districts are teaming up to look for workable solutions to the recent closure of Wetmore Attendance Center and how to transfer land into their respective districts to serve former students of the school, members of the USD 335 Board of Education noted at their regular monthly meeting on Monday, July 10.

The land in question is under the control of Prairie Hills USD 113, which voted earlier this year to close WAC at the end of the 2022-23 school year — an action that Wetmore resident Annalyssa Noe said “completely disenfranchised our entire community base” — and has presented options for land transfers that USD 335 officials have so far found to be unacceptable.

Similar requests for land transfers have come from Nemaha Central USD 115 and Vermillion USD 380, Jackson Heights superintendent Jim Howard told board members on Monday. However, USD 113 officials responded with three separate letters to each district with “different language… some of it may not be considered good faith negotiation,” Howard said.

That led to Jackson Heights board members voting on Monday to accept a “settlement proposal” to be drafted by the Kriegshauser Ney law firm of Topeka that will represent all three school districts in their efforts to get land transferred into their districts from Prairie Hills, with the as-yet-unnamed cost of the proposal to be covered by the three districts.

“If that process is no longer fruitful in writing, then we’ll probably go to mediation,” Howard said. “If that doesn’t work, we can seek a straight land transfer from the state board of education.”

In the meantime, the board also voted on Monday to work with a lobbyist who, as Noe noted, “has relations with people in the Statehouse and governmental affairs organizations” in order to try and produce some results at the legislative level.

The Jackson Heights and Prairie Hills board are currently at an impasse on the transfer of land from USD 113 to USD 335, as many former WAC students have made plans to start attending school in the Jackson Heights district this fall, while others will transfer into the Nemaha Central and Vermillion districts.

Part of the impasse between Jackson Heights and Prairie Hills involves the latter district utilizing the state’s school funding formula to receive state aid based on the district’s enrollment numbers for the previous two years. Jackson Heights board members remained adamant that the aid should go to the school districts that former WAC students transfer into for the 2023-24 school year, be it Heights, Nemaha Central or Vermillion.

The land where those students live should also be transferred into the district that serves them, Noe said during the meeting.

“There’s been quite a bit of shifting in terms of where students are going and what they’re doing,” she said. “We are asking the USD 113 board to work with us and our respective communities to redraw the lines based on where our families are attending school.”

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