Grants Pass, Ore. — There are two middle schools in Grants Pass – both, are are over capacity. Wednesday night, Grants Pass School District 7 held a public meeting to discuss what plans it has in place to help solve the issue.
Both North and South Middle schools in Grants APass have been dealing with overcrowding and maintenance issues. The school district has plans to help alleviate some of those troubles, but it’s going to come at a hefty cost. Which is why it’s looking to the community for support.
“We’ve seen a lot of increased enrollment at our middle school level,” she said.
Sherry Ely is the director business services for the Grants Pass School District.
“We need to look at some changes,” Ely said.
Those changes include renovations to both North and South Middle School – or even a rebuild.
“You can build a new North and a new South and look at maybe building a third middle school or you can build a larger north and a larger south,” Ely said.
Either way – increasing capacity is going to come at a steep cost.
“Renovations are going to run closely to rebuilding costs,” Ely said.
That’s approximately $50 million at South and $55 million at North.
Together that’s more than $100 million.
“If our populations continue to grow, we’re going to have a problem because we now have run out of spaces to convert to classrooms,” she said.
Converting certain areas of the middle school’s was something the district had to resort to in the past few years.
“Collapsed our computer labs – so we’ve removed our computer labs and converted those to classrooms. So now we just have mobile labs,” she said.
North Middle School’s student capacity is 725 – at the moment, it has 800. And South Middle School should only hold 625 students, but now it has 680.
“There just is not enough room for all those kids in those spaces,” she said.
The school district has to come up with answers soon, but it wants the community’s help.
“Whether it’s renovation, rebuilding, the work we need to do at the elementary schools – we’re talking a significant amount of money and so we would need to go to the voters,” she said.
That means proposing either a bond or a levy.
“There are different ways you can look at so that we can accomplish what we need to at the middle school level. So putting all of those options out on the table, for the community to look at and give us their input,” she said.
Grants Pass School District is holding a public meeting at 6 p.m. Wednesday at North Middle School.
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