Difficult situations lead to creative solutions and the Tahoma School District has come up with something outside of the box that could resolve overcrowded classrooms: a land swap.

Tahoma has 37 acres of property where district officials had initially planned to site a fifth elementary school at some point.

A pair of factors in the past year have come into play which would make that difficult.

First, the district’s efforts to generate revenue through a construction bond measure last April failed.

Second, nine months ago King County began an effort to change its policy on school construction outside of the urban growth boundary.

Tahoma Junior High is outside the urban growth boundary but was built because a tight-line sewer system was put in to serve the school and only the school.

As district officials began evaluating the impacts of the failure of the bond and this proposed change to county policy nearly simultaneously a whole host of creative, out of the box ideas emerged, explained district spokesman Kevin Patterson.

Among those was the idea of moving junior high students to the high school building, which was constructed in 1971, then sending the high school students to the junior high which was built in 2001.

“In looking at the cost, it was going to end up costing the same as last April’s bond measure to swap the campuses and to make some changes at other schools,” Patterson said. “We would have ended up with more portable classrooms than we would’ve wanted to keep the costs at that same level. But, it did give us more flexibility for the high school programs.”

As this concept was developed for the district by the architectural firm it works with, Superintendent Mike Maryanski was serving on a rural school siting task force created by King County Executive Dow Constantine, which was evaluating the issues surrounding construction of schools in rural areas.

During the process Maryanski began taking the dialog in a different direction.

“We asked them if they would consider having some conversations about a potential land swap with their property in the Donut Hole and our property by the junior high,” Maryanski said. “That came out with that experience of the siting task force and the real passion people brought to that table and our willingness on our part to explore other possibilities. It’s really preliminary thus far.”

King County owns a piece of property within the city limits of Maple Valley. The 156-acre chunk — which is located off Southeast Kent Kangley Road and 228th Avenue Southeast — of land is home to a county transportation maintenance facility which takes up about 13 acres, nine holes of Elk Run Golf Course and a large stand of trees. It is known as the Donut Hole because it is zoned rural, it is considered unincorporated King County yet is wholly surrounded by the city of Maple Valley, a piece of real estate in the heart of the city.

King County has worked to sell the property since 2007 with an eye toward moving its maintenance facility out to Ravensdale.

Maryanski said the Donut Hole would be the ideal place for the district to build a new high school.

Tahoma High School Principal Terry Duty thinks that is an excellent idea.

Both Maryanski and Duty said it would benefit the district as well as the entire community to have Tahoma High, which is currently in unincorporated King County between Maple Valley and Covington, in the city of Maple Valley.

And it deals with the issue of crowded classrooms far better than what the district could have done had the $125 million construction bond measure has passed a little more than a year ago.

“The school bond before had a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but, really was a band aid solution,” Duty said. “This is not a band aid solution, it brings home the high school… which should be the pinnacle of the education system. This provides that unique opportunity to design the pinnacle of that system in the heart of the community.”

A brand new high school could offer so much more not just to students but to anyone who lives in the school district.

“We can design modern, contemporary programs that trend well with Washington state needs,” Duty said. “High school is a place where we launch kids off to college but it’s also a place where we launch kids into the world of work. It would be an educational hub for the community, not only high school education but adult education.”

A modern facility with modern equipment with a level of flexibility the current schedule doesn’t offer that would work not just around mom or dad’s job but that of a teenager, for example.

“Kids will go out into the world of work and they can’t be trained into 20 year old technology,” Duty said. “Another thing would be for kids to get a high school diploma and certifications to work on cars, to work on people’s computers… so they don’t just leave high school with a diploma, they leave with skills for the work world.”

With that in mind, the next step in the early stages of this conversation, Maryanski said, is to start engaging with King County.

Conversations with the city of Maple Valley need to happen, as well.

“Then we’ll be able to have those conversations to see how this would be possible,” Maryanski said. “The biggest issue is can we do the land swap in a way that is economically feasible.”

Maryanski noted that it also allows the district to demonstrate the power of creative thinking and partnerships.

“Looking at this long term it would provide us an opportunity to create a high school around a vision,” Maryanski said. “And we’ll be demonstrating to the community that public agencies can come together and meet needs by saving taxpayers money.”

This idea, though, is exciting, Maryanski said. And in one fell swoop could well resolve the issues the district is facing.

With a high school large enough for the district’s 10th, 11th and 12th graders  — right now, that’s about 1,700 kids, Duty said — then that will create a domino effect of freeing up room at every other building in the district.

“Rather than building a new elementary school, adding on the to the high school, adding on to the junior high… building a new high school allows us to move the junior high here,” Duty said. “So, it’s a trickle down effect. We spend the same amount of money but we get a completely different result. With that goes a solution that this allows us to build a unique building for the unique needs of a high school but also solves the problem of overcrowding.”