The Albemarle County School Board received a detailed presentation on the current state of facilities planning for the school division’s three comprehensive high schools on August 14. Director of Budget and Planning Maya Kumazawa reported on the projected enrollments and capacities of each school over the next 10 years, and described the building renovations, expansions, or new construction necessary to accommodate the ever-growing number of students. Board members then had just four weeks to decide on a long-term vision for high school facilities, as they must provide guidance to staff by September 11.
“We project to grow [in enrollment] by 3.5% in the next five years and 7.8% over the next 10 years, or about 700 more students,” said Kumazawa, who said that estimates were drawn from population projections by UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center using the county’s housing development pipeline and other factors. She showed graphs that predicted persistent overcrowding at all three high schools in the next decade, most acutely in later years at Western Albemarle High School, which is operating this year at almost 200 students over capacity.
To expand capacity, explained Kumazawa, the board will need to steer the division in one of three directions, and the choices are stark. One of the paths involves an extension of the high school “center” model in which smaller satellite buildings host students participating in focused, career-oriented pathways. The school division currently leases space for a center called the Albemarle Career Exploration (ACE) Academy on Seminole Trail, that can host 120 daily students. A second ACE academy is under construction on Albemarle High School’s Lambs Lane campus on Hydraulic Road, which will serve about 400 students at a cost of $36 million. (These 400 additional seats are already included in the division’s future capacity constraint figures.)
Following the center model, the first option presented to the board is to build a third ACE academy with a capacity of 400-800 seats at a cost of between $50 and $95 million (in current dollars, though it would not be built until 2030). For a potential site, the school division has several parcels of land that it has purchased or can acquire as part of proffer agreements in various areas in the county, one of which is located directly behind Henley Middle School and fronts onto Old Trail Drive.
The second option is to build additions or separate extensions at one or more of the three existing high schools. Locations for this option include a 200-seat addition to the ACE academy at Lambs Lane, a two-story addition to the front of WAHS that would allow 400 more students, and a 250-student addition onto the west and north sides of Monticello High School. The cost estimates for these expansions range from $7 to $45 million each…