Mid-Prairie ponders school expansions

The Mid-Prairie school board last week picked up on a discussion of school facilities improvement begun in January 2020, including new classrooms to handle expanding student populations.

" (Carl A. Nelson) had anticipated initially that construction could start in fiscal year 2021, which obviously didn’t happen because of COVID,“ District Business Manager Jeff Swartzentruber said. ”They updated all of the projections to say what if construction started in 2023.“

Top-priority items listed in a January 2020 survey report to the board, in order of importance to respondents, were

• New elementary school classrooms.

• New middle school classrooms.

• Improvements to the West Elementary parking lot.

• Expanding the middle school commons

• A new middle school gym.

If the board moves forward on any of the proposals, Swartzentruber said the next eligible bond election date would come in March 2022, although construction wouldn’t begin for another year.

“If the public passed it, then we would begin planning in earnest,” he said. “Carl A. Nelson said it would probably take from March of ‘22 to March of ‘23 to get all of the schematics and architectural stuff done before they could even start to let bids.”

With the proposals first drafted before any COVID-19 cases were confirmed in Iowa, Swartzentruber said planning would have to take supply issues caused by the pandemic into account when considering prices.

“They use a 3.5% increase factor of what they had done before,” he said. “They realize that with all the jump in building material costs and that kind of stuff in the last year, that would probably be a little bit of a challenge.”

Although that’s a lower rate of increase than current material costs, Carl A. Nelson expected the market to eventually stabilize.

“They think, or they’re hoping that that levels out in the next couple of years,” Swartzentruber said. “Any time you’re working with estimates, it’s just that, it’s based on your understanding.”

A report by Carl A. Nelson detailed the expenses for various permutations of projects.

Elementary classroom additions all focused on East Elementary, where the report priced them between $1.34 million and $1.55 million for three rooms, depending on whether those were paired with new restrooms or additions to other rooms.

West Elementary paving proposals would install a retaining wall and add more than 36,000 square feet of parking lot space to the building, which a graphic in the report placed between $470,000 to $490,000.

A four-room addition to the west side of the middle school would cost the district around $1.34 million, while a new gym would run anywhere from $2.7 million to more than $3.4 million, depending on whether restrooms are installed and whether the project would require renovation to the band classroom.

Renovating the middle school commons by knocking out a wall and expanding into the current computer lab would cost $920,000. Alternatively, the report outlined an option to pair commons renovations with an office addition for $1.6 million.

While the early 2020 survey included 19 options for the school board, the above were the five most popular, each exceeding 500 votes.

Swartzentruber said the board would discuss its options at its next meeting Aug. 23 but did not have any facility-related action on the agenda yet.

“The board’s been pretty deliberate in this process,” he said. “With COVID happening, it slowed stuff way down, it put things back at least two years. There’s not going to be a decision at this next meeting, there will be conversations and questions and that kind of thing.”