EVERETT — The Everett School District has a school bond in the works for this spring.
The plan is to put a $317.4 million bond measure on voter’s ballots in April. The school board will be voting Tuesday, Oct. 8 on whether to make the ask.
The bond’s major pieces are to replace three elementary schools, modernize five buildings at Everett and Cascade high schools, fix six classrooms at Jackson High School and add 36 classrooms across eight other schools.
A fourth high school is not in the 2020 bond package. The district’s purpose for a fourth high school is to accommodate more than 1,500 students and, more importantly, relieve south end enrollment growth.
Instead, the district will use student boundary adjustments starting in fall 2020 to rebalance student sizes at its three high schools.
The elementary schools the bond funds would pay to replace are Madison, Jackson and Lowell elementaries. Each school was last modernized in the early 1990s, from district records. Hawthorne Elementary was last modernized around the same period; it’s not in this bond.
Other projects are to improve security measures at more schools.
Madison’s in the View Ridge-Madison Neighborhood; Jackson is in the Port Gardner Neighborhood and Lowell is in the Lowell Neighborhood.
Student enrollment is growing mostly in the south end, but “we plan to grow in all regions, at all (age) levels” over the next 10 years, district facilities director Mike Gunn told the board.
For your wallet, a district chart indicates the new bond won’t increase the district’s tax rate. It would stay at $4.87 per $1,000 in assessed valuation because older bonds are being paid off. The district is using a payment schedule tactic to keep the district’s overall tax rate stable through the year 2024 if the 2020 bond passes. The state’s tax rate for education is charged on top of the district rate.
The 2020 bond would be paid off by 2040. (The 2016 bond could be paid off by 2024, from a district chart breaking down the components of its tax rate.)
The district is one-for-four in trying to get a construction bond passed during this decade. Its last bond passed in 2016 for $259 million.
Voters rejected bonds in February and April 2018.
A bond must get a 60 percent supermajority to be approved. The three failed bonds had over 50 percent approval ratings but missed the 60 percent mark.
The fourth high school was packaged in the 2014 bond request but not in the smaller 2016 bond package.
Every year, construction costs increase regionally. Building a fourth high school would have cost $89 million in 2014, and that rose to $150 million in 2016; in 2018, it was priced at $216 million.
The 2018 bond failure prompted the district to create a thinktank committee for the 2020 bond.
Committee members noted the high school’s cost could have sunk past bond measures. They recommended not to add it to this package.
The district called the boundary adjustments as “temporary relief” in a presentation last week to the school board.
“We should give them a chance,” committee member Jayne Armfield told the school board.
The 2016 capital bond paid to replace North Middle School and Woodside Elementary School, and also built the brand new Tambark Creek elementary school in north Bothell. Tambark Creek, the district’s 18th elementary school, saw its first classes last month.
