With increasing enrollment and limited space, Woodland Public Schools will reconfigure several buildings for the start of the 2019-2020 school year.
Woodland Primary School, a K-1 school, and Woodland Intermediate School, which houses grades 2 to 4, will both become K-4 schools next school year. That will give the district three K-4 schools along with Yale Elementary School.
Woodland Middle School will continue to serve fifth- through eighth-graders, and Woodland High School will continue as a traditional 9-12 school.
“A year ago, we were thinking growth was going to be incremental and slow,” Superintendent Michael Green said. “We have new data that says we could have as many as 1,200 new houses coming in a few years.”
Woodland’s population in 2017 was 6,138, according to Census estimates, and the city’s most recent comprehensive plan estimates Woodland’s population will be 9,274 in 2036.
“In our current growth trend in the last three years, we’ve seen a significant increase in our new housing starts,” Travis Goddard, the city’s community development director, said.
Goddard said the city has had about 50 housing starts the last two years each, and so far this year the city has issued 32 permits. About 16 additional plans have been approved, although Goddard said some of those might not start construction until next year. Prior to 2016, the city issued permits for housing starts in the low 30s or high 20s a year, Goddard said.
While Goddard isn’t sure where the 1,200 new houses figure started, he’s heard it used around the city recently. In the city’s latest comprehensive plan, which was published in 2016, the city projected that it would receive 673 low-density housing starts and 619 high-density housing starts in the next 20 years. Based of the available land and population trends in the city, “1,200 seems logical,” Goddard said.
City officials are starting to look at potential updates to their comprehensive plan, and Goddard said the city and school district have to plan for a future that might or might not happen in the city, depending on just how many new homes do pop up.
“We need to understand what’s happening so we can advise others what to expect,” he said.
Reconfiguring the schools was an idea the district discussed a few years back when it was getting ready to open Woodland High School in 2015. At the time, the district had a K-3 school, a 4-6 school, a 7-8 school and the 9-12 high school. District officials changed the school set-up to its current system and started looking at changing things up again midway through last school year.
“It was having a pretty negative impact on kids and families,” Green said.
“There is significant research evidence that changes in school negatively affect school performance. Introducing children to a school, they’re in school for two years and then transitioning them to new schools isn’t helping them.”
Green said the previous school layout caused issues for families, as some families had kids in four different buildings in the district.
“Parents were feeling that they were bouncing about and not connected to one school,” Green said.
Some kids also spent about two hours on the bus getting home, he added.
“If you live up by Yale Bridge, you’re having to visit two other schools on the bus before the bus turns around and heads up river,” Green said.
When Woodland officials looked at their building capacities last school year, they found some room left in their elementary schools, which have a capacity of 903 students combined between the primary school, intermediate school and Yale. The district had 863 students at last count in those three schools, which Green said was done last year. Woodland Middle School has a capacity of 790 and was at 729 students last school year.
“The middle school will reach capacity in 2020,” Green said. “The elementary schools are going to reach capacity this year.”
The high school has a capacity of 866 and housed 730 students last year.
“When we built out the high school, we built it with capacity for the future,” he said.
The high school opened in 2015 after voters in the district approved a $52.8 million bond in 2012. Green said the district will have to run another bond vote in the coming years to build a new elementary school. The new school will most likely be a K-4 school, although Green said it’s possible that all K-4 schools in the district could become K-5 schools to help level out enrollment around the district.
Green said the district is going to wait and see what the city does with its comprehensive plan before deciding on when to run a bond vote. That work is just now getting under way, according to Goddard.
The city had several property owners outside of Woodland’s urban growth boundary request inclusion into the city’s boundary, Goddard said, adding that all the requests total roughly 800 acres of property. He said there are Cowlitz County residents who have divided their property looking for city water, and several land owners within the city looking to go from commercial to residential, industrial to residential or residential to industrial.”
“I have applicants on the north side of town in the hills,” Goddard said. “I also have properties in the northeast corner by the Walmart and high school area. We also have applicants interested in moving south toward Lewis River on east side of railroad.”
Goddard said there is about 23 acres of buildable residential land in the city’s 20-year urban growth area. There are two major parcels zoned residential available, Goddard said. If the parcels are divided, that could mean between permitting and construction, the city could have four to five years before it is fully built out if nothing is done. However, Goddard said that if things move quickly, Woodland could be fully built out within two years.
“Since 2014 (when city officials started working on the comprehensive plan), the economy has changed,” he said. “The growth pattern has changed. There’s not a lot of developable land available in the city’s boundary.”
