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Whether or not a Boise Bench neighborhood will keep its elementary school is set to be decided this summer. Others
Last month, news hit the inboxes of Owyhee Elementary School parents that the district planned to shutter the small school on Pasadena Drive, just north of the Boise Airport. The school district said the closure was part of a plan to turn the building into a new early childhood learning center specifically for students from three to five, which would both improve the district’s programs for preschoolers and also address shrinking enrollment in the district.
But, after parents at the school cried foul, the district announced last week it was hitting “the reset button” on the conversation and planned to bring the idea of closing the school before the full board of trustees for a vote on August 12. The district plans to take more public testimony from Owhyee parents and those at other nearby Bench elementary schools that would possibly absorb the students and has a survey for the public to provide feedback.
“Once again, we apologize for how we have handled this very difficult situation,” a statement from Board of Trustees President David Wagers said. “We hope that you will give us a chance to do better as we move forward together.”
Parents say the district’s move to close the school was premature and included conflicting language, with the district saying the decision was made to do the conversion in time for the 2025-2026 school year and then saying it was still a proposal elsewhere. Opponents of the closure say it doesn’t take into account the possibility of noisier F-16s coming to the Boise Airport and would require students to make longer trips to school on aging Bench neighborhood streets, many of which are without sidewalks near Owyhee Elementary.
If the school is closed, the boundaries would be redrawn and students would be moved to either Whitney, Hawthorne or Hillcrest.
The Boise School District said the conversion would meet the needs of the Bench neighborhood’s youngest students.
In response to a list of questions from BoiseDev, BSD spokesperson Ryan Hill said the district currently has early childhood education at 12 different schools spread across the district. This means there aren’t any facilities specifically built for pre-schoolers, which makes it difficult to implement a community classroom model where students all learn together instead of navigating the large age gap between the oldest students in an elementary school and new pre-schoolers.
This would follow the district’s current conversion of its temporary elementary school at Fort Boise into an early childhood learning center starting this fall. By converting Owhyee, it would add more preschool spots at BSD and could enroll potentially up to 300 students in the 2026-2027 school year.
“Parents of early learners are able to build a stronger and more robust community while staff can more easily collaborate with other early childhood professionals,” Hill said, about the center model.
Hill said the district picked the school for several reasons. He said the combination of its location near the Bench and South Boise puts it close to where preschool services are in high demand and the physical design of the school’s classrooms means it would be easy to convert. The school is also within at most 1.6 miles of the three closest elementary schools which have room to accommodate the 153 students currently enrolled at Owhyee. For example, Whitney Elementary School has 536 students in a school built to hold 620 students.
Some parents online expressed frustration at the district’s recent move to rebuild Highlands Elementary near the more affluent North End while considering closing Owhyee Elementary. Hill said Highlands currently enrolls 281 students, or 100 more than Owyhee, and the building had “significant structural and accessibility issues” so the building needed major work to be usable.
Hill said changing demographics in Boise have impacted the entire district, and especially hit this specific neighborhood’s ability to sustain a full-service elementary school. He said the school has struggled to maintain enrollment for twenty years and the district’s projections of birth rates, the aging population of residents within the district and a lack of new development in the area don’t indicate this is likely to rise anytime soon. Overall, the Boise School District lost roughly 3,000 students between the 2019-2020 school year and the year that just ended.
“Less students mean it’s harder for us to provide the same level of educational opportunities and services to Owyhee that we can to nearby schools with slightly higher and more stable enrollment numbers,” Hill said. “Not only will an early child learning center be able to serve more students in year one, but given the long-term demand for preschool, we’ll have a healthy, robust school for years to come.”
Candace DeMeester was expecting her five-year-old son to start kindergarten at Owhyee Elementary School next year and continue until he was ready for junior high.
But, since the district announced plans to close the school she joined with other parents trying to drum up support to keep Owhyee open. DeMeester said although Whitney, Hawthorne and Hillcrest might look close on paper, getting there would be difficult for students living near Owhyee Elementary because the neighborhood tucked close to I-84 has few sidewalks and would involve students crossing canals or going near other hazards between a mile and 1.6 miles from the current school.
She said this is a long enough distance to make it difficult for elementary schoolers to walk or bike to school, but isn’t far enough for most of the students to get school bus service.
“They hadn’t really thought about how safe it was for the kids to get there,” DeMeester said, saying the district had few answers to parents’ questions about the practical aspects of the transition for their children.
Another concern of DeMeester and other parents she’s working with to rally support is the United States Air Force’s decision to replace the A-10 Thunderbolt IIs at Gowen Field with an F-16 Fighting Falcon Mission in 2027. The plan, announced last summer, still needs a noise study to determine how the louder fighter jets would impact nearby neighborhoods, but it could impact Owhyee Elementary due to its proximity to the airport.
Earlier talks in the 2010s of an F-35 mission at Gowen Field said the jet noise from those planes, which are louder than the F-16, would make hundreds of homes near the airport unlivable near Owhyee Elementary School. The study found the jet noise would reach 65 decibels at the school itself, which is equivalent to a vacuum cleaner three feet away.
DeMeester said this jet noise could be especially harmful to the students under five who are more susceptible to loud noise the school district plans to teach in the building if it’s converted.
“Are they still planning on going forward with the transition knowing this school could be condemned?” she said, referring to the F-35 noise study from 2019. “Or would they be putting a bunch of special needs pre-schoolers in an overstimulating environment?…Why don’t you pause and wait until you know what’s happening with the planes until we know what’s happen?”
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