Spokane Public Schools poised to buy new administration building, school

Dec. 17—Spokane Public Schools may pay $12.2 million for a University District building to relocate central administration from the district-owned downtown office. The U-District space also may become the new home of the Community School.

The Spokane School Board is expected to approve the purchase of the building and 3.8-acre parcel located at 501 N. Riverpoint Blvd. at its Wednesday night meeting.

The district plans to purchase the five-story office building for $12.2 million from the Community Colleges of Spokane Foundation. The money will come from the district’s capital fund, from which the district budgeted spending $46.5 million this year with a revenue of $28.2 million.

The property is valued at $12.8 million and is located off the Southern bank of the Spokane River, a half mile away from the school district’s current administration building.

“Our thinking with this is that it’s a really good deal,” School Board President Nikki Otero Lockwood said in an interview Monday. “Brand new builds are really expensive, so it’s a good opportunity for cost savings and consolidation of property.”

The purchase is part of the district’s capital facilities planning to ultimately reduce operations costs through potential partnerships with other agencies, like the parks and recreation department, as each entity considers future tax proposals.

Though still years away, the district is considering using the space for the administration currently working out of the downtown office located at 200 N. Bernard St., Lockwood said. The University District address could also house The Community School, one of the district’s options schools currently located at 1025 W. Spofford Ave.

The Community School is a choice high school that enrolls 150 students who work on long-form projects to learn rather than watching lectures or taking tests. Students often take their learning into the community or invite professionals into their school for instruction or presentations. The Spofford school is an old elementary school, Lockwood said, and staff there have been advocating for an updated space for years.

“The location is good and, again, we can consolidate — it would be administration with a school,” Lockwood said.

Because of leases with current building tenants, school staff aren’t likely to move into the Riverpoint building for four to six years.

In this time, the district would make $1 million each year from the building’s tenants, most of which are staff from the community colleges, said Kevin Brockbank, chancellor of the Community Colleges of Spokane.

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Brockbank plans to move community college staff onto the community college campuses by 2028.

“For many, many years we had this facility with the idea of being part of the University District, which we love, but we’re not serving any students here. So I wanted to get our employees back to the colleges where the major work of fulfilling our mission happens.”

The Community Colleges of Spokane Foundation is a nonprofit that doles out scholarships, emergency aid for students and financial support to community college programs. The foundation purchased the space in 2000 for $8.6 million, initially planning to teach students within the building so they were closer to Gonzaga University and Washington State University’s Spokane campus, Brockbank said.

The sale benefits the community colleges, Brockbank said, as they’ll save around $500,000 annually on leasing the space from the foundation and will reduce their total footprint. The foundation will use the revenue to pay for its staff.

“The proceeds of the sale of the building will be used by the foundation to set up an endowment that will help pay for their staffing so that when you or I decide to donate to the Community College Foundation, we won’t be taking as large of a fee off the top to pay for operations,” Brockbank said. “Donations will be more directly driven to student benefit.”

The University District building was constructed in 1988 and remodeled in 1991.

The current district office on Bernard was built 1980 and is valued at $9.7 million.

District officials have not publicly addressed what they might do with their current headquarters or the site of the Community School if the board agrees to the moves. Lockwood said there are still conversations to be had about the future of the Bernard Street district office and Spofford Avenue school.

“I look forward to public commentary,” she said.

Elena Perry’s work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper’s managing editor.

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