Parents chafe at crowded schools. City leaders see sprawl. Growth brings pain to West Ada
The first day of kindergarten is just a month away, but Lisa and Phil Southern still don’t know which school their son will be attending.
The couple moved from California to the Treasure Valley in January 2019. They rented for a year as they searched for a place to live. Eventually, they settled on Century Farm, a new subdivision in southeast Meridian just off Eagle and Amity roads.
“We loved the homes,” said Lisa Southern by phone. “We loved the fact that it was very family-oriented.”
Most of all, they loved that their children would get to walk to the nearby Hillsdale Elementary School, which opened in 2016. Lisa Southern had spent hours researching various schools in the city and determined that it was the best place to send her children.
But a few months after the Southerns put down $50,000 on the lot and began to build, they began to hear about an enrollment cap at Hillsdale. Their 5-year-old son, they realized, may not be guaranteed a spot at the elementary school that is walking distance from their home.
Nearly as soon as Hillsdale opened, it was at capacity. Such is the case for most schools in the West Ada School District. Many students are stuffed into “portables,” temporary trailers that have started to feel permanent on crowded school sites. Over the years, class sizes have grown — now, Hillsdale’s first-grade classrooms will have 29 students, four more than the district’s standard of 25.
More homes mean more students
The sprawling school district, Idaho’s largest, comprises 26 elementary schools, 11 middle schools, six high schools, and 13 alternative schools, which include schools for children with behavioral issues and schools specializing in arts or science education. Enrollment this year reached 40,471, up 19% since 2010.
Nearly 15,000 homes are set to be built across the district in the next 10 years, adding an estimated 12,000 students, West Ada spokesman Eric Exline said. That’s expected to generate a need for $332 million or more to build at least seven elementary schools, two middle schools and a seventh high school.
West Ada cannot build schools fast enough to meet the demand that Meridian has created as it adds hundreds of homes each year. The same is true for the smaller cities of Kuna, Star and Eagle.
Ask who’s to blame, and you’ll get a circle of finger pointing: Meridian officials, who approve the subdivisions, will tell you that the district hasn’t been willing to adjust school boundaries to relieve their most overcrowded schools. The school district says the state provides too few funding options, leaving them strapped for money to build new schools. State legislators say schools and cities should better coordinate so the problems don’t exist in the first place.
One thing seems clear: Taxpayers are losing their patience.
Voter reject supplemental school levy
Since 2012, residents of the West Ada School District — which includes Eagle, Star, Meridian, and parts of northern Kuna, western Garden City and West Boise — have voted year after year to raise their own taxes to increase the school district’s operating budget by $14 million each year. This year, that changed. Only 46% of voters supported the supplemental levy in May’s election. The levy needed a simple majority to pass.
That vote followed the school board’s decision in March to cancel plans to ask voters for a $69 million bond measure to go toward new schools, out of concerns about financial hardships brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. (Bond issues require a two-thirds majority.)
The school district plans to put the levy up for a vote again in August. But the failure in May has some worrying: What if the district can no longer rely on voter support of levies?
City and school leaders are trying to come up with ideas to better coordinate their growth and pay for the new schools when they’re needed.
Adjusting school boundary lines is ‘emotional’
In May, after the ballot measure failed, Meridian’s mayor and the City Council sent the West Ada School District a letter.
“We are requesting WASD do a complete review and re-alignment of school attendance zones to be implemented as soon as practical,” they wrote.
The request came after several parents like the Southerns had bought houses near Hillsdale Elementary, only to find out that the school was full and that their children would more than likely end up at Silver Sage, a 10-minute bus ride away in Boise.
“This effort would clear up any concerns about under-utilized space, apply fair principles across the district, and allow for a reset of boundaries when one is sorely needed in our communities,” they wrote.
For the past 20 years, the school district has adjusted its boundaries piecemeal, changing school borders here and there when a new school opens. But never has it taken on a readjustment of the entire system.
That’s because boundary changes are fraught with controversy.
“Changing attendance areas is always very emotional,” said Eric Exline, West Ada’s communication director, who has also overseen 23 school boundary changes over the 20 years he has worked for the district.
“Moving kids from school to school on a regular basis is not good for kids,” he said in a phone interview. “You’re breaking apart their friendships, breaking apart their relationships with the adults in the building.”
Typically, the boundary change process happens from October through February during the school year before a new school opens. Exline assembles about 10 parent volunteers to sit on a committee and sift through school enrollment data and public comments. Eventually, they decide where the new boundary lines should go.
“We get feedback from the community — lots of it,” Exline said.
When he was working on the Star Middle School attendance area in 2017, he estimates that he got 4,000 emails from parents.
When the district in 2016 wanted to balance enrollment between Rocky Mountain and Meridian high schools, parents started to pass out flyers which implied that Meridian High students were drug users and less intelligent than their Rocky Mountain peers.
That demoralized students at Meridian High. “We ended up stopping,” Exline said.
Amy Johnson, a trustee on the West Ada School District Board who was elected in November, believes that given West Ada’s growth, boundary changes should happen more frequently.
“You have to look at it districtwide on some sort of predetermined regular basis,” she said in a phone interview.
Meridian Mayor Robert Simison agrees.
“Boundary changes — they’re not fun. They’re not popular with parents. But they’re necessary,” he said in a phone interview. “And in a growing community, that’s how we manage and coordinate the impacts of growth.”
At a school board meeting July 14, Johnson said regular boundary changes would help parents and the district to plan better. The board agreed to host a workshop to discuss what a districtwide update would entail.
While the idea seems simple enough, the reality is complicated by the details: Who would sit on such a committee to decide the new boundaries? Which would be prioritized — where students currently attend school, or who lived closest?
And then there’s the fact that the school population changes constantly, with people moving in and out of the district, and students aging out of the school system. Even with the best data, any boundary line adjustments are bound to be imperfect.
“It’s complicated planning, without a doubt,” Exline said.
Limiting development based on school capacity
Growth in the school district comes largely from new subdivisions cities have approved. The more houses each community builds, the more demand they create for public services, like police, fire, sewage treatment and schools. The district estimates that each new house in the district brings 0.8 students.
Simison wants to promote growth in certain areas like northwest and southeast Meridian, where police and fire response times are less than five minutes, and sewer lines have already been built.
But in a June City Council meeting, Councilwoman Liz Strader brought up another idea: What if the city limited building permits based upon school capacity?
Her goal, she says, was to start a discussion about possible solutions. The reaction? “It was like throwing out a tiny hand grenade,” Strader said in a phone interview.
While policies that limit growth are often viewed favorably by existing residents, often they have unintended consequences. In regions that are growing quickly, local growth limits often exacerbate sprawl, by driving new development to localities farther out that are happy to take on more residents. By limiting the supply of housing, growth limits can also push home prices up and reduce affordability.
Strader says these problems mean permit restrictions should be an “absolute last resort” — but she says merely discussing them might provide an incentive for developers, the school district and legislators to work toward a more sustainable solution on school funding.
”I don’t subscribe to the idea that West Ada is just responsible for the schools, and that we’re just responsible for the growth in the cities,” she said. “At some point, to continue growing without a solution to pay for schools is irresponsible.”
Already, Meridian’s council is taking note of how planned developments will affect schools. This month, the City Council denied an application from Toll Brothers to annex 119 acres of land at Linder and Amity roads to build a 330-house subdivision called Cedarbrook, in part out of concern about the possibility of it overwhelming school capacity.
“This will be a very nice development someday but not today,” said Councilman Brad Hoaglun. “I prefer to see more orderly growth coming out to this.”
Meridian is also hiring a planner who will help bring the City Council more consistent data on how development will affect the school district.
Impact fees for schools
Even if coordination improves, a problem remains: how to pay for the new schools that will inevitably be needed.
In Idaho, school districts are funded in part by the state, which uses sales tax revenue and a small amount from the Idaho Lottery to pay for day-to-day operations. Local property taxpayers, with a two-thirds majority, can pass bonds for new school construction. They can also approve supplemental levies, which go to help pay for additional teachers, operational expenses and maintenance. In Meridian, a third of a homeowner’s 2019 property tax bill went to the West Ada School District.
Residents are typically only willing to back a bond if the school district can demonstrate an immediate need for one.
“The funding mechanism for West Ada is reactive in nature,” Strader said. “The schools have to be overcrowded for West Ada to justify coming forward with a levy. It’s really the opposite of what you’d want to see from a planning perspective.”
There are more proactive planning tools that other agencies can use to pay for new infrastructure — such as impact fees, which are levied once upon new construction. Cities and highway districts levy them to help pay for new roads, parks and fire stations. But the Idaho Legislature does not allow school districts to collect impact fees.
Other states, such as California, Washington and Florida, allow school impact fees to make newcomers shoulder the cost of new buildings. The fees can range from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars per house.
Treasure Valley school districts have long lobbied the Legislature for authority to impose impact fees. In 2000 and 2015, the West Ada School District, along with the Idaho School Boards Association, fought for the fees. The Kuna School District took up the issue again in 2019.
But House Majority Leader Mike Moyle of Star has not supported the idea. Neither have influential lobbyists, like the Idaho Association of Realtors, which has argued that the fees could increase prices and slow home sales. And some developers argue that the fees reduce the incentive for the state to fund schools.
Impact fees would cover only a portion of a school district’s capital improvements, none of its operational expenses.
State taking on a greater funding burden
Local officials say that after years of cutbacks to education, the state needs to commit more funding to its students.
“The Legislature is ultimately responsible for not just the operational but the capital expenditures of buildings,” Simison said in a phone interview. “And I would like to see them be held responsible for providing those buildings that are needed.”
Last year, with impact fee legislation hitting roadblocks in the Statehouse, the West Ada School District proposed a different school funding option: The state should pay for half the cost of any bonds approved by voters with a two-thirds majority.
“It would lower the burden on local property taxpayers,” Exline said. “It would make it easier to try and ask for those bonds.”
But so far, the school district hasn’t gotten anywhere with its proposal.
Johnson, the West Ada trustee, wants the state to be more flexible in allowing different funding options for schools in high-growth areas.
“The viability of this area is good for the entire state,” Johnson said. “The entire community benefits from a robust public education system. It increases your real estate values. It increases your businesses wanting to come in.”
Asking for more money with each bond
The West Ada district asks for bonds every few years, with each one targeted at a few specific projects.
The most recently approved bond, from March 2018, paid to build the new Owyhee High School near Ustick and McDermott roads, the new Pleasant View Elementary School near Blackcat Road between Chinden Boulevard and McMillan Road, an $8 million expansion of Mountain View High School, and a $7 million expansion of Star Elementary.
Exline suggests a different approach: Why not ask for more money with each bond, so the district doesn’t need to ask as frequently?
The school district would ask voters to approve, say, $350 million in bonds to be sold over 10 years. The district could use the funds to buy land early, since land gets more expensive every year, and then build new schools as the need for them is generated by approved developments.
“From a planning and management standpoint, it would be much better,” Exline said. It would also require voters to trust that the district would sell bonds and build schools only when necessary.
For now, the school district is trying to handle the handful of angry parents whose children have been turned away from Hillsdale Elementary. School officials will decide which students can get in based on the date their family moved into the enrollment area.
The Southerns expect to find out if their son will start kindergarten there — or at Silver Sage — by the second week of August.
“Homes are still going up near us,” Lisa Southern said. “All these developments are advertising that Hillsdale will be their school. And I’m sure that they don’t realize that Hillsdale is capped. It’s really unfair.”
“This was supposed to be a good school and a good neighborhood,” Phil Southern said. “We paid the higher price for this house, and now our kids might have to go to a worse school.”
This story was originally published July 24, 2020 at 10:22 AM.
