Possible sites for Saukville school are all in town

All three sites being considered for a new Saukville Elementary School are in the Town of Saukville and would have to be annexed into the village, Supt. Michael McMahon said in an interview Monday before the Port Washington-Saukville School Board met in closed session to develop a negotiating strategy for the land purchase.

The land deal is contingent on the approval of a $59.4 million referendum in April, which also includes money for maintenance projects throughout the district, but school officials want to negotiate an offer to purchase one of the parcels prior to that so voters know before the election where the school would be built, McMahon said.

“Hopefully we’ll have an accepted offer to purchase pending approval of our referendum,” he said.

The district is working with a real estate agent as well as Bray Architects, the firm that conducted a facilities study for the district and would design the school, to find a site. It has identified a “priority” location but is still considering two additional parcels, McMahon, who declined to identify the potential school sites to protect the district’s negotiating position, said.

All three sites are between 10 and 15 acres, a size Bray has identified as optimal for an elementary school, McMahon said.

“We asked Bray about the size and they told us they’re working on a school in La Crosse on less than two acres but they prefer 10 to 15 acres so you can design proper drop-off and pick-up areas and playgrounds,” he said. “So that 10 to 15 acres is the sweet spot for us.”

Construction of a new school on what is currently town land could mean a departure from the district’s neighborhood school concept. All of its schools, including the current Saukville Elementary School on Mill Street, are in residential areas served by sidewalks, which means many students live near their schools and can walk or bike to them safely.

Access to the new school as well as the cost the district would incur if it has to bus additional students are considerations in the site selection process, McMahon said.

“We know we have to be mindful of busing costs, and we want kids to have that local school feel,” he said. “It’s part of the equation, although not necessarily the top priority.”

The construction of a new Saukville Elementary School on a new site is estimated to cost $45.8 million, which includes the cost of the land, and is considered the most important part of what will be the district’s first referendum since 2015, when voters approved borrowing $49.4 million for the renovation of Port Washington High School and an addition to Dunwiddie Elementary School.

The nearly 70-year-old building, which last underwent a major renovation in 1989, is in need of significant maintenance, and expanding it to accommodate what administrators believe will be an increasing number of students is impractical because it sits in a floodplain and is flanked by wetlands, according to Bray Architects.

The increasing enrollment projection, which comes at a time when the number of students in the district is shrinking, is based on a study conducted by the district and a local real estate firm that predicts 1,000 homes for families that have children will be built within the School District during the next five years.

But School Board member Brian Stevens, who last month voted against putting the referendum on the April ballot, said he believes the study exaggerates the number of children who will live in those homes.

“It sounds like they (the projections) were based on dated figures from the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “We all know the population has been declining. Birth rates have been declining. It peaked in 2017 and dropped  about 20%, so I have a little bit of a concern with the projected new growth we would see at any school.”

Beyond its size, Saukville Elementary School faces a host of challenges that range from its aging systems to its design.

“We cannot sustain that building any longer with the equipment that is there,” Director of Business Services and Human Resources Mel Nettesheim said last month.

School officials also seem to be increasingly concerned that the so-called open-concept school, which does not have traditional classrooms, although dividers have been used as makeshift walls over the years, is contributing to the challenges there. Saukville Elementary School’s state report card scores are considerably lower than those of its counterparts in the district and significantly more students open enroll out of the school than they do from either Dunwiddie or Lincoln elementary schools.

“I’ve heard from so many parents that they would never send their kids there because of the open concept,” Stephanie Trigsted, who represents the Village of Saukville on the board, said.

The district initially proposed a $66.7 million referendum but pared the cost to $59.4 million in an effort to shore up support for the new school and the most critical maintenance work in light of an October survey of district residents that projected a narrow approval margin that was within the margin of error as well as concerns about significant City of Port Washington tax increases.

“We wanted to listen to community members who spoke to some of the challenges of tax increases outside the School District,” McMahon said.

In addition to the new school, the district had planned to spend $20.9 million on major maintenance projects at its other schools to address heating and cooling systems, Americans with Disabilities Act compliance and security as well as window and roof replacement, new playgrounds and emergency generators.

But the referendum question approved by the board last month reflects a $7.3 million cut to maintenance spending at Thomas Jefferson Middle School, a move that officials said makes sense because the school is slated for major renovations or replacement in the relatively near future. The only work that would be done at the middle school under the new plan is the replacement of its roof, which has been blamed for recent flooding.

Approval of the referendum will allow the district to catch up on deferred maintenance, and school officials have pledged to create a fully funded, 10-year maintenance plan to wean the district from its reliance on referendums to care for its facilities.

“We would be starting with a clean slate so we don’t have to come back (to voters) for maintenance,” School Board President Sara McCutcheon said last month.

Borrowing $59.4 million is estimated to increase the school property tax rate by 26 cents per $1,000 of equalized value, an amount that would cost the owner of a $300,000 home an additional $78 in taxes annually.