Stanwood district uses bond revenues to buy future school property, building

By BRIAN KELLY

Herald Writer

STANWOOD — School district officials have completed the purchase of 14 acres in Warm Beach needed for a future elementary school.

There’s no timetable for building the facility, which would be the district’s sixth elementary school.

"It depends on student growth, but that’s a very logical place," said Steve Bodnar, district superintendent.

The property, located on Marine Drive just north of Lake Martha, cost the district $399,000.

At the same time, the district also bought the Professional Building in Stanwood, which will eventually be used to house the district’s administrative offices. The district paid just more than $1 million for the property on Pioneer Way.

Currently, the district’s 21 office workers are spread out among four small buildings next to Stanwood Middle School or housed in satellite offices in two schools. Some employees have been sharing desks or working evenings because of the space crunch, Bodnar said.

"What we’re trying to do is bring all those individuals into one building," he said.

A date hasn’t been set for moving district offices, but Bodnar said that’s expected to happen sometime within the next two years.

The properties were purchased using revenues from a 1998 bonds measure.

That ballot measure also funded the construction of two elementary schools on Camano Island and the conversion of Church Creek Elementary into a ninth-grade annex.

Included in the $25 million package was a new transportation maintenance facility. That project is expected to begin after the completion of the remodel of Stanwood High School and a new theater at the high school that should be finished next spring, Bodnar said.

Enrollment in Stanwood schools has more than doubled over the past decade. The two new elementary schools on Camano Island, which had gone without a public school building since 1937, were opened in September.