BENTONVILLE — The School District is exploring buying land in Bella Vista.
Michael Poore, district superintendent, declined to say exactly where in Bella Vista he’s looking but said the purpose would be for building some kind of school.
“We’ve all known we’re going to have to have another elementary site before the end of the decade, another middle school site and possibly another junior high,” Poore said.
The subject likely will be discussed Aug. 2 at the next meeting of the School Board’s Facilities Committee.
The district would need at least 10 acres to build an elementary school, Poore said.
Jack Schreder and Associates, a California firm hired to do a demographic analysis of the district this year, concluded the district will need to build at least one elementary school and acquire a site for a new middle school within the next 10 years.
The district owns vacant land in two places: on Gamble Road in Centerton and on Bright Road in southwest Bentonville. The Gamble Road site will be the home of a second high school if voters approve a millage proposal Sept. 17. However, there still would be room for another school on that site even if a high school were built there.
Jim Parsons, president of the community group Bella Vista Patriots, has spoken regularly at School Board meetings about his desire to see more classrooms built in Bella Vista. He said he and his group plan to campaign against the millage unless the board presents a real plan to expand student capacity in the city.
“If they simply buy some land just to get the vote passed and to pacify us, that probably wouldn’t influence us too much,” Parsons said. “I don’t think that’s good enough.”
Cooper Elementary School is the only school in Bella Vista. There is land just north of Cooper the district could buy and use to expand that school, Parsons said.
“There’s no reason why they couldn’t do an expansion of Cooper,” Parsons said.
Poore said he is aware of that piece of land.
“That’s one of the areas we’re looking at,” he said.
One reason the district would like an elementary in Bella Vista is because numerous children in that city are having to meet a school bus before 6:30 each morning, especially in the northern part of town, Poore said.
Fewer than 10 children get on the bus before 6:15, but that number multiplies dramatically for every following 15-minute increment, Poore said.
“We’d love to decrease some of our bus times for our younger students,” he said.
Poore said he’d like to keep the land purchase less than $2 million.
The district finished the fiscal year June 30 with a $24.8 million balance, but its operational costs are only growing with the opening of a junior high school next month. That, combined with the possible opening of a second high school in a few years if the millage passes, will pose financial challenges for the district.