This fall, the Home Education Exchange and three preschools will move from the Grace Cole Educational Complex to the North City Elementary building. North City Elementary school was closed this summer due to budget cuts.
District officials decided on the move this summer.
The Home Education Exchange is a Shoreline School District program that gives home schooled children a place to learn with parents, district teachers and other children. Three preschools rent space from the district at Grace Cole and will also pay rent at North City.
The move may surprise some parents. This spring, a proposal was made in a boundary committee meeting to move the Room Nine Community School to North City. That caused a loud public outcry. Board members, in response to that outcry, voted in April that Room Nine must move to one of the nine existing sites. (No such stipulation was made for Home Education Exchange.)
At that April 16 board meeting, board member Debi Ehrlichman argued the district couldn’t close a school, then use the building to serve another school, and that it wasn’t fair.
Moving Room Nine to North City and moving Home Education Exchange and renters to North City are different situations, she said this week. She supports the latter move.
“By having the preschools there, they’re renters,” she said. “I wanted to make sure the building is basically full and used to support our programs and make money for the district.”
Moving Home Education Exchange to North City costs much less than moving Room Nine there would have, said Marcia Harris, deputy superintendent. It has a very different staffing model, she said.
“In terms of staff, (Room Nine) uses a library, they have nursing staff, they have several students with disabilities — it’s more like a school in the staffing model,” she said.
In contrast, the Home Education Exchange depends heavily on parent involvement and has less staff. Much instruction is done by parents at home rather than at school. The program doesn’t use the district’s transportation system or a lunch program, Harris said.
In addition, Home Education Exchange is a “self-balancing” program that runs in the black and draws several students from outside the district, which is a good thing for the district, Harris said. Moving from Grace Cole will allow the program to expand from about 100 students to an estimated 120 to 150 students in the future.
District officials decided to move Home Education Exchange and the preschools from Grace Cole because they were having trouble maintaining the building and keeping it heated, Harris said.
“There’s a portion of the building that’s not used at all because it’s in such bad repair,” Harris said. “We’ve had roof leaks and various things.”
No decision has been made on what to do with the Grace Cole building, but the general consensus is that it is not worth preserving, Harris said.
She has not yet done a calculation on what the bottom line is fiscally on the move.
“We should be covering all the overhead of operating the (North City) building,” she said.
Ron Jones, who supervises the Home Education Exchange, acted as a landlord and go-between for the preschool renters at Grace Cole and will continue to do so at North City.
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