Price looks back at time in 'resilient' Moses Lake

MOSES LAKE — Michelle Price has no words to describe the 22 years she’s spent working for the Moses Lake School District.

“I had an awesome experience in Moses Lake working with the kids and the staff,” said the former superintendent.

Price is moving on to head the North Center Educational Service District ESD, an organization covering Grant, Douglas, Chelan, and Okanogan counties, as well as tiny portions of Adams and Lincoln counties, that provides training and services to school districts big and small in the region.

“The very small districts need the most support,” she explained. “The Tonasket School District is small enough that it may need a speech therapist but not be able to deploy one, so the ESD will hire one and then send them to Tonasket for the one or two days they need them.”

While the ESD helps individual districts understand and implement directives from the state legislature and the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, the ESDs receive most of their funding by providing services to school districts that the districts pay for, Price said.

A Moses Lake High School graduate who started her teaching career in Tacoma but came back to area as soon as she could, Price was superintendent of Moses Lake Schools for eight years, and said the biggest challenge she faced was trying to fit a growing number of students into aging schools.

“We’ve added 1,500 students, and the need to physical space to serve the students, we’ve tried everything to find the next best solution,” Price said.

Most of the district’s school were built by the Air Force during the 1950s and very early 1960s, making most of them 60 years old now, Price said. In the last few years, the district has been able to add two new elementary schools — Park Orchard and Sage Point — as well a the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center (which was primarily state funded).

“It took 20 years to get the legislature to do that,” Price said.

But the challenge of dealing with the oncoming wave of students currently in elementary school is ongoing, especially given that last February’s $135 million school construction bond is being challenged in a state appeals court.

“For us, for the district, the bond passed twice. But we decided not to sell the bonds until the election status is settled,” Price said. “But space is still needed.”

Price said the district is working on the education and design specifications for both the planned high school and elementary school, but if there isn’t a solution to the bond election by early fall, the district will need to figure out other solutions to its problems.

Many of the cost estimates for the new schools are based on contraction beginning in 2018, Price said, so significant delays will also result on higher construction costs.

Price believes her greatest accomplishments were boosting the district’s advanced placement programs, bringing in a teaching training and mentoring program, and increasing the graduation rate, which at 74.8 percent for all students is still slightly below the state average.

“It was in the low 60s when I started, so that’s a huge jump,” Price said. “But there’s still a lot of room for improvement.”

As for what she learned while working in Moses Lake, Price reflected on a few things she will probably take with her to her next job.

“You can’t make everybody happy all the time, and there’s more than one solution to your problems,” she said. “What’s most important are the relationships to staff and the community.”

In her new position, Price said she is looking forward to supporting school superintendents across the region and continue helping smaller school districts.

She said the Moses Lake community is “resilient,” noting that there have been times — such as the closure of Larson Air Force Base — when the city and its surrounding areas were pronounced dead.

“We keep growing and changing,” she said.

While she’s finished moving to Wenatchee, Moses Lake is where her heart, as well as her parents, children and grandchildren are.

“It’s just a long driveway to Wenatchee,” she said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.