Iowa City school board may develop new 'trigger points'

IOWA CITY – The Iowa City school board may establish new guidelines for what would compel the district to start planning for a new high school.

The reason is the district has changed the way it counts students since the board voted two years ago to set “trigger points,” as it calls them, for preparing for a third comprehensive high school.

As a result, board members said the enrollment projections they reviewed at their meeting Tuesday night were not a good basis for deciding what do with the high school issue.

“It's not apples to apples,” board member Patti Fields said of the current enrollment data and the numbers the board decided on in 2010.

The projections are considered an accurate predictor of future enrollment, however.

The board said they'd talk about the matter more at an upcoming meeting of its facilities committee.

At a meeting of that committee preceding the board meeting, Superintendent Stephen Murley said administrators would develop options to help the school board decide how to address overcrowding at the elementary and high school levels.

There is general agreement that a new elementary school will be needed on the fast-growing north side of the district, likely in the North Liberty area. There also are elementary school capacity concerns on the east side of Iowa City.

The school district is setting aside $3.2 million a year until it reaches $32 million for a high school. It would have about $14 million in unreserved funds from the voter-approved school infrastructure local-option sales tax that it could put toward elementary schools.

The $14 million would cover the construction of one elementary school or additions at two elementary schools, Murley said, but not two new schools or a new school and an addition at another school.

“The gist of the conversation is we have a lot of needs and not a lot of money” to meet them, board member Jeff McGinness said.

The school board's policy is to start planning for a new high school once three-year projections estimate that high school enrollment will surpass 3,750 students, and actual sixth-grade enrollment is between 900 and 925 students.

The new enrollment projections show that the sixth-grade mark was reached this year and high school enrollment will pass that trigger in the 2015-16 school year.

But the district this year started counting special education students who spend the majority of their time in regular classrooms, which throws off the trigger points set two years ago.

Take as an example sixth-grade enrollment. The number of those students in the report discussed Tuesday was 905. But the number of resident regular education sixth-graders is 786, which was the standard for counting students two years ago.

Further clouding the issue is school board members last month asked that administrators explore alternatives to building a third comprehensive high school.  A district committee already is studying what the school would look like, with that report due in June.

A handful of parents from North Liberty and Coralville spoke in favor of building a high school on the north side.

“The growth is just phenomenal that's going on there, and there's a real sense of community developing,” said Amy Adam, a North Liberty parent and former City High School teacher.