PORT ANGELES — The school district is recruiting 21 people for a committee to study what to do with both its facilities and its properties as it looks toward a future of declining enrollment and state funding.
Enrollment is expected to drop to 3,711 students in the 2010-11 school year, meaning about 400 fewer students than now over the next five years and $1.96 million less in state and federal funding.
Decisions will deal with the currently mothballed Monroe Elementary School building at 102 Monroe Road that was closed in June 2004 and the Fairview Elementary School building at 166 Lake Farm Road, which is scheduled to close at end of this school year.
The district also operates four other elementary schools: Franklin, Jefferson, Dry Creek and Hamilton; two middle schools: Stevens and Roosevelt, which will become a elementary school next year; a high school and an alternative high school; as well as its administrative building on Fourth Street.
Superintendent Gary Cohn said Friday he probably will seek the School Board’s approval of membership of the committee in January.
Then he will ask members of the Long Range Facilities and Capital Bond Committee to develop a recommendation, he said.
“We need to know what facilities do we need over the decades,” Cohn said.
March 12 deadline
The March 12 School Board meeting is the “outside date” — they may be done sooner — for recommendations to the school board on several plans necessary to implement the closure and realignment plan approved last week, he said.
At a Nov. 29 special meeting, the school board voted unanimously to close Fairview Elementary School, 166 Lake Farm Road, at the end of this school year and convert Roosevelt Middle School, 106 Monroe Road, to an elementary school for next year.
The district’s elementary schools also will be realigned to include sixth graders next year.
Fairview students will go to the new Roosevelt Elementary School.
All the district’s seventh- and eighth-graders will be sent to Stevens Middle School, 1139 W. 14th St.
Plans will be developed to distribute sixth-graders who were headed for middle schools to the district’s elementary schools and adjust elementary school attendance boundaries.