School curriculum is constantly evolving, and so are the actual classrooms and school buildings themselves.
“Right now, you’re seeing this big theme of collaboration,” said Damon Roche, capital projects manager in the Hockinson School District.
For Roche and Hockinson staff, that means classrooms that are connected and have moving walls, so that larger groups can meet in one room. It means separate wings for each grade. It means flexibility.
“We’re trying to be thoughtful of a future we don’t know,” Hockinson Superintendent Sandra Yager said.
Hockinson administrators are thinking about the future because they, like many other school district officials, are in the process of overseeing the construction of a new school.
The questions for school administrators around Clark County right now are what kind of school best serves students in 2016 and beyond, and, perhaps more importantly, how much does that school cost?
Hockinson is in the process of building a new $27.4 million middle school, which is expected to open in time for the next school year. Washougal School District is about 20 percent done with construction on its new $47 million K-8 campus, which will house a replacement Jemtegaard Middle School and the new Columbia River Gorge Elementary School. Camas School District purchased the Sharp Laboratories of America property for $12.5 million in July, and opened a new project-based learning middle school there in September. The district will build a new project-based learning high school on that Sharp property as well.
There are plenty of other districts looking to build new schools. School boards in Vancouver Public Schools and the Ridgefield School District voted to put bond measures up for vote in a special election in February, for $458 million and $78 million, respectively. The La Center School District might run a bond vote in April or November 2017. Battle Ground Public Schools put an $80 million bond up for vote in November, but it didn’t pass.
With a possible $735.7 million in school construction coming to Clark County in the near future, The Columbian decided to look into how much it costs to build a school in 2016, and what features school officials want included in their new buildings.
Overall costs
Of the two local districts currently constructing new buildings, Washougal and Hockinson, Washougal is paying $310 per square foot in construction costs for its 122,000-square-foot K-8 campus, and Hockinson is paying $321 per square foot for its 84,000-square-foot middle school replacement and $326 per square foot for improvements to the high school. Its high school improvements include a new band room and sports pavilion, more athletic fields and public restrooms, and seating and security upgrades to the school’s main sports field.
Additionally, Washougal school officials said that the soft cost for the school is around $410 per square foot at the moment. Soft costs include the price of design, permits and furniture. Hockinson officials said they didn’t want to provide a soft-cost figure until the project is completed.
Woodland Public Schools opened a new 153,652-square-foot Woodland High School in 2015, paying $314 per square foot in hard costs and $407 per square foot in soft costs.
Building a home in Clark County probably costs more than $100 less per square foot than building a school, according to local homebuilders. Schools are more expensive to build, partially because of the size of the land and the building, the various types of rooms needed in a school and school-building regulations.
School districts hire architects, civil engineers, structural engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, landscape engineers, low voltage designers and acoustic consultants. Those fees are usually between 5 to 10 percent of the total cost of the project, Roche said.
Donald Luthardt, an associate principal with LSW Architects in Vancouver, said architects can get in on the design process pretty early, sometimes even before a school has passed a bond vote, while districts try to come up with figures for how much a project will cost and how much to ask the public for.
“The districts will have some sort of educational plan that we try to make the buildings fit in with,” Luthardt said. “There will be a set of givens and we have these symposium meetings, and we break it down to general needs and wants.”
LSW has worked on projects for Vancouver Public Schools, the Camas School District, Evergreen Public Schools, the Ridgefield School District, the Hockinson School District, Battle Ground Public Schools and Clark College.
“It’s very broad-brush approach,” he said. “We get the fat markers out. We try not to get into details too early.”
The number of people who work on a school depends on the size and complexity of the project, as well. He said sometimes it can be a team of three or four people and other times it’s between eight and 10. One or two people usually stick with the project through construction.
LSW’s fee is a percentage of cost based on square footage, Luthardt said.
“A much larger school will have a much larger cost, but the percentage (we get) is lower,” he said. “For smaller schools, the percentage is higher. In reality, there’s no such thing as a small project. Everything needs a lot of attention.”
While Ridgefield’s bond vote isn’t until February, district officials have already done some planning and design work to get estimates for the new 5-8 campus and an expansion of Ridgefield High School. Currently, the school estimates it would cost $313.50 per square foot for the new campus’s construction, and $335.50 per square foot for construction of the high school expansion.
The new campus project would cost about $69.7 million, Superintendent Nathan McCann said. The breakdown of that money is: roughly $54.6 million for construction; $4.6 million for architects and engineers; $4.4 million for furniture, fixtures and equipment; $2.6 million for professional services; and more than $800,000 for permits. There’s also a little less than $3 million set aside for unforeseen costs.
At Woodland High School, Principal John Shoup said the school construction met some unexpected costs when landscaping took longer than expected and workers discovered a gas tank buried in the ground on the school site.
Money sources
The money for the Ridgefield project, like all other school building projects in the area, will come from bond money approved by voters. In 2015, Washougal residents voted in favor of a $57.7 million bond and voters in Hockinson passed a $39.9 million bond.
The biggest bond project coming to Clark County in the near future is in Vancouver Public Schools, where officials felt the timing was right to ask residents to vote on a $458 million bond measure in February. If it passes, the district will build 11 schools — eight replacement schools and three new ones.
“Bond programs are generally large programs,” said Todd Horenstein, assistant superintendent for Vancouver Public Schools’ facility support services. “In Vancouver, we try to space them out. We try not to do bond issues on that frequent of a basis. As we look across the district, we’ve very mindful of excellency for all our students. We want all our kids to have similar experiences in spaces that support teaching.”
Horenstein said there are a few factors that went into putting up a bond for nearly half a billion dollars. One is an immediate need. He said the district has about 2,000 students it considers “under-housed,” meaning they’re in portable classrooms. That problem will only get worse as time goes on if the district doesn’t do anything. The other major factors, Horenstein said, are that construction costs will continue to increase the longer the district waits because of inflation, and that bond interest rates are low at the moment.
“It’s a window of opportunity for trying to do as much work as possible,” he said. “We’ve retired a significant number of older bonds and have capacity to take on new bonds.”
George Jiang, a professor of finance at Washington State University, said in an email that the Federal Reserve adopted a very low interest rate policy in recent years, and with a low interest rate, the cost of borrowing money is low.
“We are in a period with historically low interest rate,” Jiang said.
Horenstein said the district also knows it can bring in outside money for the project, which will cost about $562.8 million in total. The district expects $50 million in state matching, a $42.8 million grant from the state to build more classrooms to decrease class sizes, and an estimated $12 million from school impact fees courtesy of new homes built in the district.
Location
Once the district has the money to build a school, officials also have to figure out where to put it, which can provide its own challenges. Some schools are built close to wetlands, which require additional permits and regulations. The design of the new Washougal campus also was shaped by its location in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.
“The project needs to be visually shielded from the eight key viewing areas,” said Joe Steinbrenner, facilities director for the Washougal district. The building has a maximum height of 35 feet because of the scenic-area restrictions, he added.
Rick Yeo of R&C Management was hired to oversee the school’s construction. He said the exterior of the new building will do its best to not stick out.
“There will be a lot of natural stone and a lot of neutral earth tones,” he said. “It will have very low-level night lighting.”
Luthardt, who has been in the industry for 20-plus years, said that sort of limitation can make a project challenging, but it allows for more uniqueness in the design.
“The older schools all kind of look the same,” he said. “There’s a whole 21st century schools movement. It’s looking more into how schools affect (the) quality of education the learners are getting with varying sizes of spaces, flexibility, adaptability (and) just offering choices for large group learning, smaller group learning, independent learning. It’s more fun to design schools now.”
