Part 3
By Trisha Walker
Columbia Gorge News
HOOD RIVER — Eighty years ago, in 1946, Winston Churchill coined the phrase “Iron Curtain,” the United Nations held its first meeting, and Frank Sinatra made his Columbia Records debut.
Eighty is also the average age of Hood River County School District (HRCSD) facilities. As reported in parts 1 and 2, HRCSD’s Long Range Facility Planning Committee (LRFPC) spent the past year identifying the needs of each site while weighing declining enrollment and ever-rising costs.
The committee also reviewed facility consolidation options to better serve students now and in the future, and assessed athletic field conditions. While the board will eventually consider whether to go out for a bond in the spring of 2027, this decision will follow further work from the Long-Range Facilities Planning Committee — all topics we explore in this final report.
Optimizing spaces
As reported in part 2, none of the district’s school sites are at capacity. There were 371 fewer students enrolled this past school year than in 2016-2017 — and if current trends continue, HRCSD could lose another 288 students by 2034-2035.
Wenaha Group senior project manager and LRFPC partner Cassie Hibbert said LRFPC members participated in a tabletop exercise exploring both how facilities are currently utilized, and opportunities to better use the space as a theoretical exercise.
The committee brainstormed and discussed five possibilities, looking only through a lens of student outcomes: Consolidate grades 7-8 at either Wy’east or Hood River middle schools, with elementary schools housing grades K-6; build a new high school on a different site, with the current high school converted to a middle school for grades 6-8; consolidating Parkdale and Mid Valley elementary schools into one site, either in Parkdale or Odell; or closing Cascade Locks Elementary, with students bused to other elementary schools.
The results were put before the Administrative Council for input, along with the question, “What do you think about the educational opportunities of these options?”
The Administrative Council marked consolidating the middle schools into one site as challenging, while opening a new high school, consolidating Parkdale and Mid Valley, and closing Cascade Locks were marked somewhere in the middle — not challenging, but not easy.
Griffin Construction then estimated the costs of each option based on comparable projects around the state, which ranged from $0 (closing Cascade Locks) to at least $283,400,000 (building a new high school; see related graph).
Again, this was a theoretical exercise; there are no plans at this time to undertake any of these options. “These give you a decent idea of the magnitude for those optimizing spaces ideas,” Hibbert said.
Athletics Master Plan
Steve Nelson, Opsis Architecture and LRFPC member, next updated the board on the district’s athletic fields and the costs to bring those fields up to current standards. Once again, Griffin Construction estimated the costs, with the facilities committee later prioritizing each identified project.
Tier 1 projects, or those identified as the highest priority, ranged from replacing fencing at HRVHS (approximately $38,000) to improving Wy’east’s “soccer complex” (approximately $6,935,000); total costs for all projects were estimated at almost $19.5 million (see related graph online at columbiagorgenews.com). Project priority was based on overall usage to benefit the greatest number of people, Nelson said.
Financing and options
With projects and costs identified, HRCSD Chief Financial Officer Mark DeMoss said the question becomes how to generate the funds needed to move forward.
“It’s important to recognize that regardless of all of our wants and all of the demands we have on us, the voters have to approve our financing,” he said. “We can’t generate it out of our operating fund.”
He suggested that multiple, smaller bonds would help, noting that education trends can change in the 20 years it takes to get a bond paid off — he used the example of the construction of computer labs, now outdated in this time of individual iPads. With matching grants from the state, smaller bonds could also mean a bigger overall impact with fewer taxpayer dollars. Even with the passage of a bond, the district will need to be selective in the projects it pursues, he said.
LRFPC will continue to meet over the course of the next school year.
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