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Nokesville will get a K-8 school
The Prince William School Board has voted to approve an unusual K-8 school for Nokesville.
The new school, which is tentatively set to open in 2014, will be an alternative to renovating and expanding the existing Nokesville Elementary School.
The K-8 school will be built next to Brentsville District High School and will serve approximately 948 students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
Superintendent Steve Walts said during the June 16 School Board meeting that one of the reasons he supports the new school is because even with renovations, Nokesville Elementary will be an old and deteriorating building.
“I'm deeply concerned about the infrastructure at that building and the ongoing costs that we will eventually have,” he said. “After we do a multimillion-dollar renovation, we will still have an 80-year-old infrastructure.”
The preliminary design calls for the elementary students and the middle school students to be housed in separate wings with a courtyard between them.
The design envisions 100 students per grade, plus 48 special education students.
That adds up to 600 elementary students and 300 middle school students, meaning the school will be much smaller than a typical elementary (850 students) or middle school (1,200 students).
Nokesville parents, who have been involved in the discussion, accept that there will be some trade-offs, said Gil Trenum, the Brentsville representative on the School Board.
“Nobody gets to have their cake and eat it too,” he said, noting that in exchange for the smaller school they want, parents will have to give up a specialty program and major athletics program -- the K-8 school will have neither.
That's because there won't be enough middle school students to justify those special programs, said Pat Puttre, associate superintendent for middle schools.
Eighth-graders at the new school may be able to participate in the high school's athletics programs, she said, and students will be able to apply for specialty programs at other schools.
The other downside is that the school is more expensive.
Renovating Nokesville Elementary and adding 10 new classrooms would cost about $14.4 million. Building the K-8 instead will cost $31 million.
The staff report notes that “construction cost for the additional 300 middle school students is approximately double that of a standard middle school.”
Some of the School Board members raised their eyebrows at the notion of spending more money to house fewer students but they agreed to give the new model a try.
Walts said the extra cost will be worked into the budget plans -- the school system won't have to give up anything in order to cover it.
Trenum noted that the school division is “still playing the catch-up game” when it comes to building enough schools to keep pace with development.
Population projections indicate that the influx of new students will continue in the next few years and overcrowding will continue to be a problem.
If the school system gets fewer students than expected, the 300 middle school seats in the K-8 may buy some time, allowing the school system to go for longer without building another new middle school.
If the county gets more new students than expected, “those 300 seats become even more critical,” he said.
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