Bond Project Update: August 2022

The path from empty field to thriving school can be long and fraught with setbacks.

No project better exemplifies that journey than the new Bethel High School. When our School Board voted to purchase 54 acres of land from Rainier View Christian Church in 2009, the hope was that we would be able to build a much needed fourth comprehensive high school on the site in a matter of years.

As we all know, it didn’t work out that way.

So what was the big holdup, and why haven’t we built the new Bethel High School yet?

First, the property wasn’t zoned for a high school in 2009. District leaders immediately began working with Rainier View on a Comprehensive Plan Amendment application to have the property rezoned from Rural Farm to R-10. When the county approved the rezone in 2012, the district applied for a plat amendment and boundary line adjustment, which wasn’t approved until 2013.

The Pierce County Council eventually approved a plan to build a high school on the land, but complaints filed with the state’s Growth Management Act Hearing Board delayed the project once again.

After years of back and forth, Governor Jay Inslee finally signed a bill into law in 2017 that allowed Bethel to build a school on the site, despite it being located about a mile outside Pierce County’s urban growth boundary.

So, with all the governmental hurdles overcome, we were finally ready to build a school. All that was left was passing a school construction bond. A bond to build the school failed with voters in February 2018, and again in November of 2018.

The bond finally passed in 2019, and the district’s planning and construction teams immediately began work on the new school.

Then, just as plans were being made to construct the school, updates to a Pierce County Stormwater Manual delayed the project once again. The updates reflected the evolution of “best available science” and resulted in development standards that are different than were the District purchased the property in 2009.

The changes to the Stormwater Manual included new, more stringent threshold methodologies to determine if the site’s stormwater would impact a “Category One Wetland,” which is located in the southeast corner of the new Bethel High School site.

In a new Bethel podcast, Sara Coccia, the district’s Director of Construction and Planning, said her team had finalized all the modeling and started to develop a stormwater system. She said she planned on getting those updated documents and designs to the county later this summer or early in the fall, including our conditional use permit application.

“These things take time and we want to get the school open as quickly as possible, but we’ve got to do everything we can to make sure we are protecting the site and the large class one wetland on that site,” she said.

More than 13 years after purchasing the land, we are excited to begin construction on the project late next year or in early 2024. The construction timeline is 27 months, with an anticipated opening in the fall of 2026.

Elementary #19

Our planning and design teams are also hard at work on what will soon be Bethel’s 19th elementary school.

The 64,000-square-foot school will be located in the Lipoma Firs community and will be a walkable, neighborhood school. It will house nearly 500 students in 24 classrooms.

A vision statement for the new school states: “Bethel Elementary #19 will be the bright, open, and fun heart of the community, empowering all learners through a culture of belonging and connection. The learning will be enhanced through flexibility and functionality, inspiring this supportive culture of the whole child.”

Construction crews will break ground on the project in 2023 and look to have it completed in 2024.

Naches Trail Elementary

When our construction bond passed in 2019, Naches Trail Elementary was slated to get a complete remodel and expansion. But a cost analysis determined it would actually be more expensive to modernize the current Naches Trail than it would be to build a new school.

The new school site is being prepared and the team is excited to see the building “go vertical” later this summer.

The 77,000-square foot school will house 41 general classrooms and is scheduled to be ready for students in the fall of 2023.