Expansion at Current HS Site is Only a Short-Term Solution

You may have woken up this morning to an anti-bond letter to the editor in the Des Moines Register. While we don’t agree with the overall argument that the letter makes, we are happy that people are at least discussing the bond issue. A good debate on the issue is healthy. However, there were some arguments made that we wanted to take a moment to provide some answers to in order to clear up any potential confusion.

In general, the letter implies that this bond vote is solely about a new high school. In fact, successful passage of this bond vote allows the district to move forward with the K-12 Facilities Plan which alleviates overcrowding K-12. This bond vote is about more than a new high school. The letter also states that “the City of Johnston does not need a new high school”. It is important to note that it is not as simple as comparing city boundaries with each other. The Johnston Community School District’s borders do not end at the city limits. They include all of Johnston, and portions of Des Moines, Grimes, Granger, and Urbandale. It is also difficult to compare other cities and their populations with Johnston because the two the letter cites, Ankeny and Urbandale, are different from Johnston. Ankeny is so large that they built two high schools. The city of Urbandale is not all within Urbandale school district boundaries. Urbandale students not only live within Johnston School District boundaries, but also West Des Moines, Des Moines, and Waukee School District boundaries.

The Johnston Community School District needs more space for students, and without bond passage, portable classrooms will be used to create that space as permanent solutions are sought out. 

The majority of growth is happening in the northwest area of the city of Johnston where there are still undeveloped areas and plenty of lots available for building in that area. Homes are also for sale throughout the school district and young families make the decision to move to Johnston every month. The number of building permits issued continues to rise.

The hundreds of residents that provided input through facilities study committees over 2+ years looked at adding on to the current high school site as one of the various options they reviewed. The overwhelming majority of committee members did not support a Band-Aid solution of adding on to the current high school because of problems with that option that were found when the group studied its feasibility. This included lack of land on site for actual expansion.

Pioneer understandably has a desire to retain their valuable research ground and therefore will not sell the district any additional land to expand to the west. Parking spaces, which are already in short supply, surround the current high school, so any building expansion would be decreasing the amount of parking spaces available at the same time more students would be incoming. If you preserve the parking spaces by utilizing portable classrooms instead of building additions, then those get placed in the grass strip between JHS and NW 62nd Avenue, creating a major eyesore and obscuring the school itself.

Another obstacle is the fact that NW 62nd Avenue is the only entrance and exit for the site, and we all know how traffic is there right now in the mornings and afternoons when school gets out. If the high school was added on to, that would mean potentially 1,800+ high school students in addition to the 1,250 8th and 9th graders for over 3,000 students in the same general area, further congesting the location.

By tacking on building additions to the current high school site, you also begin to deal with capacity issues in spaces that were built for a smaller school building, such as the hallways, number of lockers, auditorium, cafeteria, etc… If you expand those spaces, you’re losing classroom space so you’ll have to expand outward even more, in space we don’t have.

The letter is correct in stating that “the current high school is sound, physically”. That is the very reason why the K-12 Facilities Plan that the bond supports includes renovation of the building for grades 8/9. But again, this is more than a high school issue. If the bond fails, our K-12 overcrowding problems will only persist and worsen as enrollment continues to grow.