Converting Magnolia's Catharine Blaine into a 6-12 school - as Seattle School Board member Dick Lilly recently suggested - is not the best solution for setting up a high school in Queen Anne or Magnolia, according to some local parents.
There was also some talk at the Queen Anne Parents Forum two weeks ago about building a brand-new high school in one of the two neighborhoods, but a committee of local parents has dropped that idea as wishful thinking.
"New construction of a comprehensive high school is probably not going to happen, due to the cost and other priorities the school board has," conceded Lisa Bogen, who heads up a forum committee originally charged with developing long-term solutions to the assignment problem.
The parents forum group also called for the formation of short-term and middle-term-solution committees, but those committees had not yet met, said Jennifer Geist and Carolyn Burkland, parents involved in the two committees.
In fact, there is some talk of combining the middle-term and long-term committees, Bogen said. In any event, the long-term group has met already and decided to focus on working with existing facilities, added Bogen, who specifically objects to the proposed Blaine conversion.
There's no way that should happened, she said, "primarily because that just doesn't seem like a good environment for our kids." Bogen said she's worried that younger kids' exposure to the older high-school students might make them grow up too fast.
That's not to say Bogen and the other 19 parents on her committee have given up on the idea of seeing a high school in Magnolia or Queen Anne.
Ideas floated so far, she said, include turning either Blaine or McClure Middle School into a 9-12 high school, making or keeping the school that's not a high school a middle school, and reopening the closed Magnolia Elementary School as a K-5 facility. Another possibility on the table is turning Magnolia Elementary into a K-8 facility.
The committee planned to meet this week to begin drawing up a list of pros and cons for each facility, Bogen said, but potential problems have already surfaced. For example, she said, Blaine and McClure probably don't have the capacity needed to become comprehensive high schools.
In addition, converting schools to other grade configurations is more complicated than just changing the name. "Renovations are definitely in order," Bogen noted.
School district spokeswoman Patti Spencer agrees. "To get Magnolia Elementary back on line as an elementary would probably cost somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars," she said. "But that's relatively minor."
Because of facility needs, such as computer labs, the cost to ramp up Magnolia Elementary to a middle-school level would be in the millions of dollars, Spencer said. "That becomes a major capital program."
Converting a former middle school like McClure or the K-8 Blaine into a high schools would be equally pricey, she said, and the cost for building a brand-new high school would be astronomical.
"There are very likely going to be changes in school configurations," Spencer said of Magnolia and Queen Anne in particular and the district as a whole. That will take awhile.
The school board is currently completing work on a five-year plan for assignments in the district, and everything will be reviewed within the context of improving academic achievement, she said. "But we're not at the point of being anywhere near decisions in any area."
There is another factor that could complicate plans. "We have buildings nowhere near being used to their full capacity," Spencer said. That may mean closing down some facilities, as was done with Magnolia Elementary, but there is no talk of selling off that Magnolia school, she said.
Spencer declined to comment about the chances for any of the proposals above, but she said one suggestion is definitely off the table. That suggestion was to reopen Queen Anne High School, which was converted into apartments in 1987 at the cost of approximately $7 million; the developers of the project, Lorig & Associates, have a long-term lease with the school district, Spencer explained.
The news will be a relief for residents of the building, some of whom were worried about having to move, said Kymberly Fowler, assistant building manager at the Queen Anne High School Apartments.
Even without a long-term lease, the chances of the building morphing into a neighborhood high school are nil, according to Fowler. "That would cost an absolutely insane amount of money. They really gutted it," she said of former Grizzlies headquarters.
Staff reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com or 461-1309.
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