Pasco School District: Building the Future for our students and families

In the Pasco School District, we are working shoulder-to-shoulder with our community and staff as we continue moving forward and #BuildingtheFuture for our students, families and staff members. I would like to highlight some of the major milestones we have reached and share some additional information about projects on the horizon.

In January, the district updated its Strategic Improvement Plan based on input from staff and community stakeholders. This refreshed five-year plan will be focused on five key initiatives to support our “Outrageous Outcomes.” Through their input, staff and community members overwhelmingly told us that social/emotional support for students was a high priority.

So, we have reframed “Outrageous Outcome” goal No. 5 to highlight this priority. It now states that “100% of students will experience meaningful connections and hope for the future.” Progress toward this goal will be measured through data in the Healthy Youth Survey and our Student Perception Survey. We will prepare to launch this new Strategic Improvement Plan in the 2020-21 school year. The district has also completed work on a Long-term Facilities Management Plan. This guiding document provides a framework for the district to follow over the next 10-15 years as we continue to address enrollment growth. We want to sincerely thank the members of our Community Builders group for the time and effort they put into completing this important work.

Thanks to a mild winter, our construction teams are making great progress on the District's fourth middle school, Ray Reynolds Middle School, and our 17th elementary school, Columbia River Elementary. The projects are next to each other on Burns Road and are moving along swiftly. Both schools will be ready to greet students this fall.

We want to thank our design and construction partners, MMEC Architecture and Fowler Construction, which are leading the work on Reynolds Middle School, as well as Design West Architects and Chervenell Construction, which are leading the work on Columbia River Elementary. Construction on a new, expanded Stevens Middle School is also progressing nicely. Stevens students will move into their new building in January 2021, right after the winter break. We want to thank our design and construction partners MMEC Architecture and Fowler Construction, which are leading the work on the new Stevens building.

With the addition of Reynolds Middle School, and a new, expanded Stevens Middle School, our middle schools can now accommodate more students. Therefore, the district is moving forward with plans to move our 6th graders back to our middle schools this fall. The move will open up needed classroom space at many of our elementary schools.

Finally, in August 2019, we invited parents, community members and District staffers to get involved with our Comprehensive High School No. 3 Planning Task Force. The group has been meeting regularly for the last nine months as they work to create a conceptual design for Pasco’s third high school.

Members of the group traveled to the Yakima Valley and to the Seattle Metro area last fall to tour several recently built high schools. The group returned with plenty of insights into how school districts are designing their new buildings to provide optimal learning experiences for students. We want to thank MMEC Architecture and DLR Group for their work with this project. The Task Force is scheduled to provide our school board with some conceptual design plans for a third comprehensive high school later this spring.

Together, we are #BuildingtheFuture for our students and families, creating a solid foundation for our children, who will become our next generation of leaders. With gratitude, I am proud to say, “We are Pasco.”

This story was originally published April 23, 2020 at 5:01 PM with the headline "Pasco School District: Building the Future for our students and families."