Boise-area school district’s bond votes keep failing as development booms. This is the result
What happens when a part of the Treasure Valley grows and grows, but its local school district fails and fails to win enough votes in an election to pay for new schools for all those added children?
That’s a question the Vallivue School District, west of Boise in booming Canyon County, is answering. Unwillingly. Vallivue’s elementary schools are so overcrowded that the superintendent says they’re running out of room just to add even more portable buildings than the dozens they’ve already crammed kids into.
The school district is turning to its local-government partners for help. Stop approving new developments, the district asked the Caldwell City Council this fall. We just cannot handle them.
That idea didn’t quite get the reception that Vallivue hoped for.
At a Caldwell City Council meeting earlier this month, council members approved a development for 70 new homes near two of the district’s most crowded elementary schools.
In a letter to the council, Vallivue’s director of federal and state programs, Joey Palmer, asked that the city halt all developments, especially those within the Lakevue Elementary and Central Canyon Elementary school attendance boundaries.
Lakevue Elementary, in west Nampa, is 235 students over capacity.
Vallivue is overdue for at least two new elementary schools. Two bond measures to build the schools failed in the past two elections, in March and August, forcing the district to pack new students into existing classrooms and bring in portable classrooms, Palmer told the Idaho Statesman by phone. Without a bond, the district asked for a development moratorium as a last resort.
“A long-term solution to alleviate Vallivue’s overcrowded elementary schools is not in sight,” Palmer wrote.
The 9,600-student district encompasses parts of Nampa, Caldwell and unincorporated Canyon County. In an April letter to the county commissioners, Superintendent Lisa Boyd detailed the district’s dilemma.
“The Vallivue School District is made up of 144 square miles, the majority of which used to be farm land,” she wrote. “Development is eating up that land at an alarming rate. We are one of the fastest-growing school districts in the state. This year alone, Vallivue’s student enrollment spiked to 8.3%, which is more than 650 students. For comparison, the Nampa School District has grown 3.3% and the Caldwell School District has grown 0.6% this year.
“Our schools cannot keep up with this growth,” Boyd wrote.
Vallivue adds 46 portable classrooms
A development moratorium, or halt to all development in a city, is unpopular. Caldwell Mayor Jarom Wagoner said he is not a fan. Even in May 2021, when cities paused development while reviewing the ramifications of a controversial new state property tax law, Wagoner, who was on the council, voted against a moratorium.
“If you start just denying everything because of the schools and there’s no other factor to it, then that can really hurt you in regards to having places for people to live that want to work in Caldwell,” Wagoner told the Statesman by phone. “It could hurt the housing prices, it can make them go even higher. So it’s a really delicate balance.”
But growth has been destabilizing Vallivue for years now.
The district added almost the maximum number of portable classrooms it can add to each of its elementary schools, according to Palmer. Boyd wrote in April that Vallivue had added 46 portable classrooms in five years.
“So other than filling up our classrooms adding a couple more portable classrooms, there’s not a whole lot we can do,” Palmer said.
At Lakevue Elementary, Kimberly Brown’s fifth-grade classroom has 35 students. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average elementary school class size in Idaho is 23.8.
Lakevue was built to serve 725 students but now has 949, Palmer said. Fifty students who live Lakevue’s attendance area are being shuttled about a mile and a half to Central Canyon Elementary School, Palmer said. Now Central Canyon is filling up, with the entire fifth grade in portable classrooms.
There are two new developments being built in the Lakevue and Central Canyon zones, but those students are going to be shuttled to a different school, West Canyon Elementary, which is nearly 10 miles away.
“I am hoping that real estate agents in those neighborhoods say, ‘Yes you can see Lakevue and Central Canyon, but you are going to have to drive 9-10 miles out to West Canyon for school,’” Palmer said.
Would a moratorium be legal?
But can the cities or the county impose a moratorium because of school overcrowding?
Palmer said the answers he’s received to that question vary, with Nampa, Caldwell and Canyon County each saying different things about whether they can deny an application or implement a moratorium based on overcrowded schools.
Wagoner said he believes the Caldwell City Council could place a moratorium on development within Vallivue, but he prefers to help in other ways. He said the city can partner with school districts on a long-term solution for overcrowding.
Amy Bowman, spokesperson for the city of Nampa, said in an email that the city’s legal counsel said the City Council should “use caution” in how it considers school capacity in land use hearings.
“Neither the city nor an applicant have any control over what the school boards do regarding their facilities,” Bowman said. “Using school facilities as the sole basis for denial of an application before the city inappropriately yields land-use authority to the school district instead of the City Council.”
Wagoner publicly supported both of the failed bond measures and said he wants to work with the Legislature on a statewide solution that would include impact fees for schools and a reduction in the size of the majority needed to pass school bonds.
State law allows cities and counties to impose impact fees on new construction to offset the cost of certain local services that must be provided. The idea is to help growth pay for itself rather than force existing taxpayers to foot the bill. Fire and police departments can receive revenue from impact fees on developers to pay for the added burden that new construction will bring to their work, but schools cannot.
Vallivue’s latest bond measures failed by thin margins. The March measure received 64% of the vote, the August measure, 65.7%. The measures authorized the sale of $55 million in bonds to be paid back by property taxes to build two new elementary schools, repair buildings and buy land for a future high school, the Idaho Statesman reported. The August vote fell one percentage point short of the needed 66.7% supermajority under Idaho law.
“Changing the requirements for school bonds could make it a little bit easier,” Wagoner said.
Idaho districts ask for donations
With nowhere else to turn, school districts like Vallivue and Kuna are asking developers for donations of $1,000 per home in a new development.
Palmer said many developers are open to the idea of making what he calls per-door donations but often don’t agree to the full $1,000.
“The amount of donations per door that they’re willing to do is absurdly low to serve as the solution to the overall challenge that we’re facing,” Palmer said.
According to World Population Review, Idaho spends about $8,000 per student per year.
In her letter to Canyon County, Boyd said Lakevue Elementary School has been affected mostly by developments by local builders CBH Homes and Hubble Homes.
She said Hubble had shown no interest in assisting Vallivue with land or building support. In an email to the Idaho Statesman, a Hubble Homes spokesperson said the company’s land department has been working with the school district, but Palmer told the Statesman that the builder declined to donate either land or $1,000 per home.
“If they define working with Vallivue as telling us no to land and per-door donations, then they have been working with us,” he said.
In an email, Boyd said Hubble has offered to help disseminate information regarding a bond election.
Palmer said CBH owner Corey Barton expressed interest recently in donating land but has not offered to pay the per-door donations. Toll Brothers, which owns 284 acres in Vallivue boundaries, offered the district land for a future school, Boyd said in her letter.
In an email, CBH spokesperson CeCe Cheny said, “We support and give back to the school districts as much as we can.”
Palmer said voters often tell districts that they need to get the money from new developers instead of longtime taxpayers.
“When we do get developers who are willing to donate and we report back to our patrons, they often say ‘How dare you only ask for that amount of money. That’s way too small,’” Palmer said.
Palmer said even with $1,000 per door and impact fees for schools, there would not be enough money to pay for entire schools, so bond sales would still be needed.
Overcrowding hurts teachers, children, superintendent says
Boyd said the overcrowding is making it harder to hire and good teachers and educate children.
“When schools are not built to accommodate students, it makes recruiting and retaining teachers more difficult and forces a higher student-to-teacher ratio, which can compromise the quality of attention and instruction students would otherwise receive,” she wrote.
She said asking voters to pass bond issues, only to see the fail, is stressful.
“We have to spend time trying to convince patrons that these schools are necessary,” she said. “However, many patrons are so exhausted by the rapid growth that they vote no, thinking that it will stop the growth, not realizing that the growth continues, but schools cannot be built.”
Business and Local News Editor David Staats contributed.
