Building a new Covington Elementary is listed as a top priority project for the Kent School District but that doesn’t mean a new school will be built anytime soon — it will likely be several more years before the vision for a new school becomes a reality.

“We’ve got a levy coming up in early 2014 — a maintenance and operations levy and tech levy,” said district spokesman Chris Loftis. “…If we can pass a levy then we can start talking about a bond. The levies take priority at this point. Levies keep the doors open that we already have.”

Loftis explained that the levies make up 20 percent of the district’s operating budget, making passage essential.

“Our sense was that in this political and economic climate it’s very unlikely we’ll be able to pass two levies and a bond in the same year,” Loftis said. “The levy is absolutely essential…for us to even think about losing 20 percent would be cataclysmic.”

New schools and facilities are built with money from construction bonds which must be voted on by residents. Loftis said that levies are taxes used to maintain already existing facilities and programs and a voted bond is essentially residents giving the district permission to borrow the funds needed for higher priced projects.

“Voters in this area are very supportive of their schools, but if you ask for too much you’ll lose,” Loftis said.

The need to pass the levies means that a best case scenario would be for the district to run a construction bond in late 2014 or early 2015. Loftis said in that bond a new Covington Elementary would be a top priority. After the passage of a bond it would be another two to three years before a new school could open.

“It’s a facility that is reaching the end of its utility,” Loftis said of the current building.

The school was designed in the 1950s and opened in the ‘60s.

The district already owns a piece of property at Southeast 252nd Street and 152nd Avenue Southeast in Covington near Kentwood High School where the new elementary school would be built.

Loftis said the district is estimating the new school to cost $35 to $40 million.

“We’ve got to meet current needs and anticipate future needs,” Loftis said.

The district had approximately $16 million set aside for the new school from the 2006 bond measure but earlier this year decided to reallocate those funds to other district projects including new surveillance cameras, new lockdown technology, and new athletic facilities at Kentwood and Kentridge.

“When we went though the Sandy Hook situation in December we realized we had some security needs and the board knew it needed to address those issues,” Loftis said of the School Board’s decision to reallocate the funds. “That means that in the next bond a larger portion would go to Covington.”

Loftis said that while some might have considered new football fields and tracks as luxuries, the district saw the existing facilities as safety issues.

“From our persepective those were keeping our students safe while our students do what they do and in this case that was sports,” Loftis said.

When it comes time to run a bond, Loftis said the district will reach out to the residents of Covington to inform them about the proposed school replacement.

Despite a bond being at least a year away, the district is already starting to prepare. Last fall the board commissioned the Citizen’s Bond Review Committee made up of representatives from each school and each board member could also nominate one person to the committee. Each school had the chance to submit a project proposal for the committee’s consideration. The committee met every week for two months, reviewing the projects and prioritizing them.

“It was a real logical process that we used,” said committee chairman Amy Hardebeck, who is also executive director at Lake Wilderness Arboretum in Maple Valley.

Hardebeck also said that the committee prioritized the projects before they were assigned dollar figures, so they wouldn’t be influenced by cost. In October the committee presented a finalized report to the board and recommended a $180 million bond.

The committee didn’t rank the new Covington Elementary because it is already one of the district’s declared top projects. The projects that made the top of the committee’s priority list were replacing fire alarms, replacing roofs that are past their lifespan, replacing portable ramps, boilers and door hardware.

“The gist of it was safety and some of these things are beyond their lifespan,” Hardebeck said.