District begins planning for 2 high schools

MOSES LAKE — Teachers and administrators with the Moses Lake School District have begun planning for a second high school should voters approve the $135 million bond measure on Feb. 14.

“We’re looking at partner schools, sharing courses and some programs, at least at the beginning,” said Jessica Merritt, the librarian at Moses Lake High School and a member of the planning committee.

An obvious resource the two schools would share would be the swimming pool, as any new high school will not have a pool of its own. But Merritt and Moses Lake High School Principal Mark Harris also envision a school where not only students can go take the classes or the program they need, but instructors can come to them as well.

“If there’s an advanced class, or only one section offered, we’d like to share instructors,” Harris said.

“We do want to have a hybrid,” Merritt said. “We want to have neighborhoods assigned, so that students have a home base.”

However, school officials have only put together a “skeleton” of a two-high-school partnership. A lot of specifics — which programs and instructors will go where — cannot be decided unless voters actually approve the bond and work on the new school begins.

“The district and the county are already talking about how to share the fairgrounds,” Harris said. “But we don’t know what that means for our agriculture program.”

School officials also intend to give the new high school a chance to develop its own culture, and plan on starting grades 9 through 11 at the new high the year its opens — keeping all of the seniors at Moses Lake High School that first year.

Harris said that if the bond is approved, he expects both schools will open in 2021 with roughly 1,300 students each.

However, if the bond is not approved, Moses Lake High School is prepared to continue as it is, with three tracks of students and 11 school periods that have some students starting class at 7 a.m. and others at school until 5 p.m.

“We have not maxed out our three-track system,” Harris said.

Dividing the students among the three tracks, especially those with outdoor, extracurricular activities, has proven to be a challenge, Harris said. It also doesn’t help that the high school is used nearly every night of the week as well.

“This is very much a community resource,” he said.

Drew Williams, a history teacher and administrative intern at Moses Lake High School, said the group studied a number of other examples of districts like Moses Lake that built second high schools and found the most common mistake involved drawing the boundary lines and failing to get the demographic and socio-economic balance of the new school right.

“We don’t want to create sides of the tracks,” he said.

“This is not going to be an easy transition,” Merritt explained. “Moses Lake has always been a Chiefs town.”