With the start of the 2022-23 school year on the horizon, parents in Ridgefield are starting to get a clearer picture of the cramped classroom conditions some students will face amid rapid population growth in recent years.
Videos circulating on Facebook on Thursday morning showed first glimpses of one of the district’s converted classrooms that’s serving as a temporary solution in light of that growth.
“I didn’t know my son’s classroom would be in a gym until I walked into the building and met their teachers on Wednesday night,” said Natalie Schubert, whose son is a fifth grader at Sunset Ridge Intermediate School, where the wrestling room has been converted into several temporary classrooms with mobile partitions and, in some cases, balance balls for chairs.
Since 2019, the Ridgefield School District has seen five consecutive bond failures — each time an attempt to convince voters to fund the construction of new school buildings to accommodate the anticipated growth.
Though the votes have regularly surpassed 50 percent support — with as high as 59.17 percent support in the April 26 special election — state law requires bonds to exceed the 60 percent supermajority threshold in order to pass. The law has left parents, community members and district staff frustrated and now forced to triage the overcrowding with last-resort strategies such as what’s being offered at Sunset Ridge.
“I realize the district is in a really tough situation, and obviously they can’t just snap their fingers and make a classroom appear out of thin air, but they have absolutely failed our children by not making a plan until the night before,” Schubert said. “We need to uncover any unturned stone to help our students right here, right now to better retrofit those classrooms for our students starting next week.”
Reaching out to legislators
On Thursday night, community members met with state Rep. Monica Stonier in Abrams Park to voice their concerns about the law.
“(Thursday night) was educational for us on what’s happened in the past and what Rep. Stonier has been trying to do in championing the issue of the supermajority,” said Tara Nathan, a mother of two students in the Ridgefield School District who attended the meeting.
“We’re just hoping to return the issue to a simple majority that was changed during the Great Depression,” Nathan said. “It made sense for the Great Depression, but we no longer live in the Great Depression.”
In January 2021, Stonier — who represents Washington’s 49th District and serves on the House Education Committee — proposed HB 1226, which would do away with the supermajority for school district bond elections — meaning that, like levies and most other elections, bonds would require only a 50 percent-plus-one majority in order to pass. The bill, however, did not make it off the House floor.
Ridgefield officials have spoken out on doing away with the law, most recently just before the district passed its replacement levy earlier this month.
“When you have 59 percent of voters voting yes, in any other election that’s a landslide,” board President Joe Vance said in July. “But unfortunately, the way bonds are run in Washington, the minority of people can prevent critical classrooms and infrastructure from being built.
“When the city was building a new roundabout, they didn’t need 60 percent to build that. So it’s ludicrous that we need that. It’s absurd.”
Making plans for the future
In the months following the bond’s double failure earlier this year, Vance and other school officials revealed a variety of plans to convert building spaces into new classrooms, such as the Sunset Ridge wrestling room, the theater room and more. The district also redrew some of its elementary school boundaries in May to balance enrollment between two of its elementary schools.
Nathan, who grew up in Ridgefield, said she recognized how the district had made an effort to prepare the community for the plans to convert the wrestling room as a last resort in recent months — only she’d imagined it would be more of a set-in-stone renovation.
“The district did tell us this,” Nathan said. “They said they were going to cannibalize spaces and turn them into classrooms. But I think the part that was frustration is that there was no conversion of space; they just put up some partitions.”
Now with the school year about to start and no bond on the horizon, Nathan, Schubert and other parents are hoping the school district can work with other local agencies to find alternative solutions that provide better spaces for their students.
“They just can’t continue to point fingers at each other,” Schubert said. “I think the city needs to take accountability for things that has negatively impacted citizens, just for people to hear, “’Yeah, we messed up. This is not how we saw this going. We are going to try to do better.’”
Schubert added that she was able to speak with Ridgefield Superintendent Nathan McCann on Friday, relaying that he described the solution as satisfactory in the moment but as a “lose-lose situation” overall.
“The approach is to just wait and see, essentially,” she said. “We would like to see them move to a more permanent answer on where to move with that space. But can we get grant funding? Can we get portables? We as citizens just want to turn over every single stone to see what’s possible.”
