KEARNEY, Mo. — Last week, the Kearney School District decided to pause building a fifth elementary school.
In April 2022, voters approved a $44 million zero tax rate increase bond issue to fund the school district and construct a new elementary school. Before inflation, the cost to build the school would have been around $25 million, but in today’s economy, the price tag is constantly changing.
“When they put the bond referendum forward and factored in escalated costs, we budgeted about $31 million,” KSD Superintendent Emily Miller explained. ”As we were working with our architects and our construction managers, we were seeing preliminary estimates come in at $33 million to $38 million, so it was well beyond what we had initially budgeted.”
Dr. Miller said no land has been purchased, but the idea was to tentatively place the school on the west side of town, where a new interchange off 19th and I-35 is being built.
The push behind building a new school was an increase in enrollment, in fact, while advocating in support of the bond, the district predicted enrollment would increase 37% by 2032. However, current enrollment has yet to bounce back following the pandemic.
“All school districts experienced enrollment declines during the pandemic, currently the school district is not alone, we are about 50 students down from where we were previously,” Miller said.
As of now, the student to teacher ratio at Kearney schools is 22 to 1, and while the district says there is some overcrowding at its elementary schools, student learning is not being impacted.
“We are not in a situation where we have children learning in hallways or things like that,” school board president Darlene Bailey said. “The seams are tight, the seams are tense, but they're not busting at this point, so we have a little bit of time.”
As for what’s next: the school is evaluating and focusing on other projects such as renovations to student bathrooms and improvements all across its schools. Meanwhile, many parents are in support of the district’s plans to reassess.
"Honestly, kudos to our school district for kind of pumping the brakes and reevaluating and doing really making sure they have meaningful use of those funds to make student's experience more impactful,” Rachel Thomas said.
The school district plans to work with an outside company to conduct a community survey on what plans residents may want in the future.
The district is encouraging parents who may have additional questions, concerns or ideas send an email to communications@ksdr1.net.
