Charter school officials delay grade school plan

Efforts to built the proposed Richard McKenna Elementary School are expected to resume within the next three years.

Plans to build a charter school in Mountain Home have been temporarily put on hold after McKenna charter school officials pulled the building's conditional use permit application before the city planning and zoning commission.

Efforts to build the proposed Richard McKenna Elementary School are expected to resume within the next three years.

"We want to get it closer to the actual date of construction," said Larry Slade, director for the local charter school. "We're just waiting a little longer."

Spanning 22,000 square feet, the charter elementary school on East 8th North Street would provide classes for up to 170 students in kindergarten to sixth grade. It would be located on an existing athletic field formerly owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Similar in appearance to Richard McKenna Charter High School on South Haskett Street, the grade school would include six classrooms in the main building for students in first to sixth grade. A separate facility would include a kindergarten classroom along with a multipurpose room to accommodate school programs.

School officials expect the class sizes there would average about 24 students.

Future plans call for building a second facility next to the kindergarten and multipurpose annex for seventh- and eighth-grade students, Slade said.

During a public meeting in December, a handful of people provided comments and some raised concerns regarding the planned school facility. One individual in support of the project highlighted the accomplishments associated with the existing charter high school here.

However, people voiced their concerns with the impact the school would have on the Mountain Home School District and whether it would require local taxpayers to foot the bill to build the school in the form of a levy.

In response, Slade emphasized that state law prohibits charter schools to use bonds or levies to pay for these facilities. Instead, they have to either take out bank loans or save up money to build them.

"We're like our own little school district," Slade said.

In addition, people at that public hearing were equally concerned with the amount of additional traffic the school would generate. The facility would be located just four blocks from East Elementary School.

The street itself currently deals with a significant amount of traffic every day, some people argued at the Dec. 2 planning and zoning meeting. That traffic gets worse as children walk or ride their bikes to and from East Elementary, they added.

Those traffic issues prompted the planning and zoning commission to halt its discussions on the school's conditional use permit until officials with the local charter school completed a traffic study. Findings in that study would gauge the impact the proposed school would have on increased vehicular traffic, bicycles and pedestrians around the facility.

Construction is scheduled to begin once funding becomes available, the city approves the conditional use permit, and the elementary school's charter is approved by the Public Charter School Commission.

As part of the effort to create the school, officials with Richard McKenna Charter High School sent out flyers late last week to parents with school-age children regarding the proposed facility.

Details are also available on the school's website at www.rmckenna.org/k8.