ROSSFORD – The school district is investigating its options for building a new middle school.
The district opened its elementary school, which holds prekindergarten through fifth grade, in 2019, and it high school for grades six-12 in 2020.
Since then, economic and housing developments have meant more people moving into the district.
“We’re growing, that’s a good sign as well,” said Superintendent Dan Creps.
He said the district hadn’t decided on what type of building but initially the idea was for a grade four-six structure.
“But we’ve emphasized we’re just at the starting point of all of this,” he said.
“With all of the positive business development that’s been going on in this area, along with that comes employees and employment opportunities,” Creps said.
He listed three housing developments that are planned in the district: across from the elementary school on Lime City Road, on Simmons Road and on Oregon Road north of Ohio 795.
“We want to look at this proactively,” Creps said. “Let’s get ahead of this and look at it without commitment.”
At Monday’s board of education meeting, he announced that while the district had posted requests for qualifications for an architect to design a middle school, he was in an information gathering phase.
Woolpert, a strategic consulting firm in Toledo, is doing an enrollment study, he announced Monday.
The company will look at birth rates and enrollment numbers over the past 10 years as well as projections forward. Woolpert will also look at housing developments in progress and those being planned.
Results should be back by early November. It they don’t show expansion is necessary, they won’t do it, Creps said.
The elementary “has solid growth” and the district was not able to accommodate all open enrollment requests this year.
“We had to turn some away who had been with us for a while because those programs were full,” Creps said.
A student outside the Rossford district has to apply each year to be accepted through open enrollment.
Creps said he is seeing the same issue at the high school.
“Open enrollment is becoming an issue,” he said.
Enrollment growth in the district since the new schools opened was not immediately available.
If a new school becomes necessary, they will have designs in place, he said.
“I don’t foresee a decision being made until at least in 2025,” Creps said.
The potential timeline would have a new building opening in 2028.
Woolpert will give enrollment projects that are least likely, most likely and highly projected, he said.
“We’ve already (progressed past) the high projections” that were outlined in a 2017 study, he said.
There is no room on the downtown campus, so if new construction is deemed necessary, it will happen on property the district owns near the R and elementary school.
Expansion of the elementary school is not an option because of overcrowding the lunch schedule and common spaces used for art and phys ed. There is space that an addition can occur on the Glenwood Road side of the high school.
Rossford used to have a junior high for grades seven-eight on the downtown campus but when the new schools were designed using the 2017 enrollment study, the decision was made to have two buildings instead of three.
