The La Center School District could be on its way to building a new school for the first time since 1993.
Results from Tuesday night’s election show the district’s bond measure passing with 65.78 percent of the vote and way more than enough returned ballots to certify it.
The bond required a supermajority, or 60 percent plus one vote in favor, to pass and the district needed 40 percent of the turnout from the most recent general election. More residents in the district voted as of Tuesday’s nights results than in the 2017 general election, with 2,104 ballots counted.
In the 2017 general election, 1,953 residents in the district voted.
For this year’s bond vote to pass, the district needed at least 782 votes overall and 469 “yes” votes, according to the Clark County Elections Department website. La Center has so far received 1,384 yes votes to 720 no votes.
“We were more worried about the 60 percent threshold,” Superintendent Dave Holmes said. “We saw early in the week, the return ballots were enough to pass the certification threshold.”
Holmes gave credit for the strong turnout to a community group who rallied to inform residents about the election.
“I certainly think the work that (chairwoman) Melinda Mazna and the Citizens for La Center Schools did had a big impact on getting the word out to the citizens considering the facts of overcrowding in our schools,” Holmes said.
Should the results hold, most of the bond money will deal with overcrowding, specifically at the K-8 campus, where there are 1,736 students, 375 of whom are considered “unhoused,” meaning they have class in one of nine portable classrooms at the school. There are also two portable classrooms at La Center High School. There are no open classrooms in the district, and if the K-8 campus adds another portable next year, which is expected, it will most likely go on the football field because there is no room elsewhere.
The plan for the bond money is to build a new 81,375-square-foot middle school, which would open in time for the start of the 2020-2021 school year. A little more than $1 million of the bond money would go toward renovating the K-8 building into an elementary school. That building would require some repairs, but most of the work would be things like lowering the water fountains and cabinets, and getting smaller furniture.
“We will begin immediately taking input from community members, staff, students to work on the details of exactly what we’ll be building,” Holmes said. “It’ll be done with lots of input from lots of stakeholders and in a very thrifty manner, which is the calling card of the La Center School District.”
This is the first time the district has asked residents to vote on a bond in nearly a decade, since La Center’s $34 million bond in May 2008 failed with 40-plus percent approval. The new school would be the first built in the district since La Center High School was constructed in 1993 using bond money from a 1991 bond measure. La Center Elementary School and La Center Middle School were built in 1961. The high school was renovated in 2006, and the other two schools were renovated in 2004.
