Construction begins on new elementary school

MOSES LAKE — With eight golden shovels tossing a little dirt Thursday morning, construction of Vicki I. Groff Elementary School — the 11th elementary school in the Moses Lake School District — has begun.

“This is the most exciting day of 2020,” said Superintendent Josh Meek during the ceremony. “It was a long road to get here.”

“I don’t really have the words for this,” said Groff, who served on the Moses Lake School Board for 30 years prior to her retirement last fall. “I am so blessed.”

“Your name will forever be etched in this community. In more ways than one,” Meek said as he handed Groff a construction hard hat signed by the MLSD cabinet, school board members, architects and builders.

The $18 million, 450-student elementary school is one of two new elementary schools slated for construction in MLSD following a revision to the $135 million construction bond measure passed in February 2017. The bond measure, which passed by only three votes, originally funded construction of a second, 1,600-student high school and another elementary school.

However, a year-long challenge to the bond election, as well as the election of two new school board members opposed to the big high school, forced the district to rethink how the construction bond money should be used. In early 2019, after a series of public hearings, board members voted to build a smaller, 900-student high school between Moses Lake High School and the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center, as well as two new elementary schools after concluding that would better suit the district’s needs.

Groff Elementary is expected to be completed and ready for students in the fall of 2021. The site for the second new elementary school has not yet been chosen.

Even as the dignitaries turned over shovelfuls of earth, work crews from Fowler Construction had already been busy for several days grading and preparing the school site, which is located south of Nelson Road near Moses Lake Christian Academy.

“This has been a big week,” Meek said. “The contractor is on site, officially, and has started clearing the site, so we’re off and running.”

As part of the school project, the city of Moses Lake will build a new road going northeast from the intersection of state Route 17 and Yonezawa Boulevard called Moses Lake Avenue.

Meek said that construction on the road, which will be handled by the city, has been delayed because of the expected revenue shortfall caused by the two-month closure of much of the state in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.

City officials did not respond to requests for comment prior to press time while Meek added he was confident the money will be found for construction, but said the district was going ahead with work on the new school anyway.

“It isn’t slowing down the project,” Meek said. “We’re doing everything we can to do work on the streets, so we’re not fearful that it won’t be there.”

Groff said she is in the sixth week of an eight-week series of radiation treatments for what her doctors feared was a fairly deep skin cancer on her scalp.

“I’ve got two more weeks, and we’ll celebrate,” she said. “But by then, I probably won’t have any hair.”