During the coming weeks the Tahoma School Board has some tough decisions to make and that’s exactly what the ad hoc student housing committee was aiming for with its recommendations.

The board received the committee’s report at its Nov. 8 meeting.

Tahoma Superintendent Mike Maryanski described the five-month efforts of the 19-member committee as “a very valuable learning experience.”

“This group of people really pushed me to change one of my mental models… that over a long period of time that we’ve just been making it work,” Maryanski said. “We’ve got to quit talking about maximum capacity because we’ve been beyond capacity for a long period of time.

The committee was challenged initially because there was a desire to evaluate why they were there in the first place.

This group was formed in response to the failure April 26 of the district’s construction bond measure. The district had hoped to sell bonds to raise $120 million for maintenance, to build a fifth elementary school, add classroom space to Tahoma Junior High and Tahoma High, among other projects.

The committee began meeting shortly after the school year ended in June and met once or twice a month until its final gathering on Oct. 26 at Tahoma Junior High.

“A lot of people on the committee wondered, ‘Where did this bond measure come from? I didn’t read very much about it,’” Maryanski said. “One of the themes that came up was if we had marketed this a different way… maybe this would have passed.”

Yet, district staff was able to show the committee evidence of every effort it had me to communicate the message of overcrowding in classrooms, yet Maryanski said, “we still didn’t do the job because friends and neighbors were still asking the committee members, ‘Where did this come from?’”

The plan was for the committee to offer the school board short-term and long-term options.

“I made a decision early on that it wouldn’t be productive to try and prioritize this list,” the superintendent said. “When we started that process, it was all about, ‘Let’s get creative here.’ If we can’t pass a bond measure then what are we going to do with the young people as the growth continues to occur. Some of those decisions are program-related decisions. Any solution that looks long-term needs to consider how to get kids out of the portables.”

That was one major message the committee had for the board, Maryanski said.

“They also told us to be really patient about one thing,” he said. “Some of the administrators said it was pretty clear, we can create a lot of capacity if we do some sort of multi-track option. The committee’s message to us and to you was pretty strong: please use this as a last option, we don’t want the community to think we’re punishing them as a result of the bond vote.”

Tanya Donahue, a member of the committee who has a sixth grader and ninth grader in the district, said the committee had plenty of ideas.

“The hardest part, I think, Mike had to keep gearing us toward our main thing: to come up with short-term solutions,” she said. “We didn’t want to do that, we just wanted to fix it, to go find that $25 million.”

Kevin Kalberg, who also served on the committee, told the school board the group covered a lot of ground.

“Mike’s instruction’s were, ‘Think outside the box, the school board has to make this decision, so nothing is off the table,’” Kalberg said. “Whatever you guys do, I implore you to have Plan A, B, C and D ready to go. We’re talking about 2020, which is nine years away, but when the last bond issue was passed in 1997 we though we were fine.”

Board member Bill Clausmeyer was impressed with the creativity of the committee.

“This board has sat in untold number of meetings on student housing,” Clausmeyer said. “You guys have touched on things that have never been proposed. I was very impressed with the work you guys did.”

In the committee’s report, staff included a significant amount of data the group used to some extent to formulate its recommendations, which were not prioritized.

Among that was data from demographers which showed that since 1985, only the Issaquah School District has grown faster among districts in Puget Sound, with enrollment going up 139.4 percent in the past 25 years.

In that same time period, Issaquah district voters have approved more than $500 million in bond measures, while Tahoma voters have approved about $61.5 million.

The committee came up with eight short-term solution recommendations, a number of ideas for long-term solutions, and gave the board a great deal to consider.

“We’re at that point where we need to sit down, roll up our sleeves and give you the resources to make this decision,” Maryanski said. “I believe they’ve given you some options in that packet that will force you to make some really difficult decisions… I think that packet will well serve the decisions you will make.”