Convert the gym into classrooms? Southwest Phoenix-area schools scramble to handle growth

When Michael Sivertson became principal of Youngker High School in the summer of 2020, he was told that the school’s growth was projected to take off. At the time, it had around 1,700 students, he said.

Just three years later, Youngker's enrollment for fall 2023 will be around 2,180.

“We have growth in pretty much every direction,” Sivertson said.

Youngker High School is in Buckeye, one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. Once a primarily agricultural area, it has grown from just over 50,000 residents in 2010 to around 105,000 in 2022. And it’s poised to keep growing — the city is only 13% built out, according to Buckeye spokesperson Annie DeChance, and new developments are announced regularly.

“Every direction, there’s either new building currently going on, or they’re positioning for it,” Sivertson said. “They’re digging in the dirt ... the farmland is gone.”

Districts across the southwest Phoenix area, which has two of the nation’s fifteen fastest-growing large cities, are scrambling to accommodate their service areas' explosive growth. Many are trying to secure funding to build new schools while finding ways to manage more immediate capacity concerns.

Less than a mile south of Youngker, homebuilder D.R. Horton is writing seven to 10 sales per week for Estrella Vista, a development that opened last year that will have about 535 homes, according to sales representative Heather Heutmaker.

It's one of a number of housing developments that have cropped up around the school in recent years. About a mile northeast of the school, D.R. Horton is selling single-family homes at Desert Moon Estates, which opened in 2021. For now, the development has built around half of its planned 430 homes.

“There was nothing there two years ago,” Sivertson said, pointing northeast from Youngker toward Desert Moon. “All of that area north of us was desert.”

When Sivertson arrived three years ago, the first phase to handle Youngker’s growth was to secure portable classrooms, he said. But the school became “tapped out with space,” Sivertson said, and soon needed more growing room.

"Moving into the coming school year, we had to do something," he said.

The district decided to turn one of Youngker’s two gyms into classrooms.

Construction began in the fall. Now, what was once a wide-open gymnasium with four basketball hoops has become two floors of 12 classrooms that will house the school’s world language and freshman math classes. The $4 million project included soundproofing the building’s weight room, which will share a wall with Algebra I come fall.

The loss of the school’s main practice gym has been an adjustment for the sports teams, Sivertson said.

Youngker’s six basketball teams — three girls' and three boys' teams — began adapting to the change this past season after construction began. Since all six teams can't fit at once in the school’s only remaining gym, which has three courts, they stagger practice times rather than all practicing immediately after school, according to Tonya Lee, the school’s athletic director. This fall, the badminton and volleyball teams will have to do the same.

The biggest challenge has been managing game days, Lee said, because home wrestling matches and basketball games, which run late, mean the other teams can’t use the gym. Sivertson said the school tries to work with the Arizona Interscholastic Association to schedule boys' and girls' basketball games on the same days — one home, the other away — to avoid this conflict, but it’s not always possible.

“I don’t ever want to cancel practice,” Lee said. On those days, teams might try to get in the gym “as quickly as possible after school to get some work done, and then maybe we can go into the weight room, or we can go in the classroom and do film or ... our character stuff.”

The gym conversion has given Youngker some breathing room, Sivertson said.

But it’s a stopgap, said Buckeye Union Superintendent Steven Bebee, to handle growth as the district seeks funding for what it really needs: another high school.

As the district tries to "get in line" for funding from the state, it's working on securing land for its next school, Bebee said.

“Buckeye is growing so rapidly," he said. "If I wait another year, the land we need will not exist. It will all be built up.”

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'Bursting at the seams': Agua Fria and Tolleson high school districts add classroom space, plan for new schools

East of Buckeye Union, in Agua Fria Union High School District, the rush of students began in 2019, according to Superintendent Mark Yslas. At the time, the district had around 7,830 students across its five schools in Buckeye, Avondale and Goodyear.

This year, it is anticipating a minimum of 9,504 students.

Within Agua Fria’s boundaries is Verrado, an 8,800-acre master-planned community in Buckeye that opened in 2004. It could include over 14,000 homes at build-out and has 4 million square feet of space for office, light industrial and retail, according to its website.

For Yslas, the projected growth in the area surrounding Verrado High School is the “most alarming concern.”

The district’s ideal enrollment for Verrado High School, Yslas said, is around 1,800. Now, it has around 1,850 students, and the district’s demographer, economic research and consulting firm Applied Economics, projects the school to grow to nearly 2,600 over the next four years, Yslas said.

It’s not just Verrado High School that’s seeing growth.

“We are bursting at the seams,” Yslas said.

The district has increased the amount of classroom space in at least four of its schools, he said, by adding buildings and converting office spaces.

“We turned an old gymnasium facility at Millennium into more space for the marching band,” he said. “We added … a separate two-level building at Canyon View that added 14 classrooms.”

In December, the School Facilities Division, an arm of the Arizona Department of Administration in charge of funding new school facilities, approved around $47 million to fund the construction of a sixth high school in the district. But a new school is going to cost between $110 million and $125 million, Yslas said, so the district is going out for a bond in November to fund the difference.

The bond, which is not expected to increase taxes, is the only avenue the district has now to build another high school, Yslas said. Last fall, voters rejected the district’s bond attempt by about 700 votes, he said.

Though there have not yet been discussions among district leaders about what might happen if the district is unable to fund a sixth high school, Yslas said, “the reality is, if we don't have enough space for all of them, we would have to come up with some other type of plan to educate all.” Other school districts across the country have had to implement double sessions — when half the students attend in the morning, the other half in the afternoon — in order to deal with limited space, he said.

The formula for how much money the School Facilities Division allocates for new schools is dictated by state statute, according to Megan Rose, spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Administration. There have been cases in which districts received an individual legislative appropriation to fund the remaining cost of a new school, she said.

Agua Fria’s neighboring high school district to the east, Tolleson Union, saw a drop in enrollment at the beginning of COVID-19 like many districts. But enrollment soon recovered, said district spokesperson Joseph Ortiz, and returned to its trend of increasing by 3% to 4% each year.

The district is trying to get approval to build a new high school in Alamar, a 1,150-acre master-planned community in Avondale that opened in 2020. The development currently has around 1,200 home lots, according to Alamar community representative Alicia Sanchez, and may have up to 4,000 homes at build-out, according to its website.

To manage growth from Alamar in the meantime, the district added classrooms to La Joya Community High School, Ortiz said. It did the same at Copper Canyon High School to prepare for the development of Stonehaven, a nearby master-planned community, and at Tolleson Union High School.

The district's youngest high school, West Point, which opened in 2019, was more than 200 students over capacity this past school year.

Tolleson Union is hoping to support the construction of the new high school with money from a bond going before voters in November, Ortiz said.

Uneven growth in Fowler and Litchfield elementary school districts

For some districts, the southwest Valley’s explosive growth has caused uneven enrollment.

In southwest Phoenix’s Fowler Elementary School District, attendance has shifted in recent years, according to Superintendent Nora Ulloa. The southern part of the district, below West Lower Buckeye Road between South 83rd and South 67th avenues, is “growing leaps and bounds” due to nearby home and apartment development while enrollment on the north side is declining, she said.

This past year, it was a problem for the district’s southwestern-most school, Tuscano, where enrollment as of April 2023 was around 770, Ulloa said. Each of the district’s other schools had less than 550 students, and the district’s northeastern-most school, Sunridge, had less than half the enrollment of Tuscano, according to Ulloa.

“Having so many young children in a classroom is extremely challenging,” she said. And while it’s not uncommon for class sizes to vary from year to year, Tuscano's enrollment "is predictable and it's going to keep growing,” Ulloa said. “So we want to avoid that.”

The district redrew its internal boundaries for the upcoming school year to move around 250 students out of Tuscano, Ulloa said. The boundary changes, outlined in a letter from Ulloa to the Fowler community, will impact each of the district’s five schools.

“It’s a growing area, and we’re lucky to have new students coming in,” Ulloa said. “But we want to make sure that they have the best possible opportunity, and classes of 35 just is not the way to go.”

The Litchfield Elementary School District, which stretches west from Litchfield Park and parts of Avondale into parts of Buckeye, is also grappling with uneven enrollment trends.

While the district’s eastern portion is seeing declines, largely due to an expansion of charter schools in the area, according to the district’s 2023 demographic and enrollment analysis by Applied Economics, its western portion is experiencing “extreme, rapid growth,” said district spokesperson Sam Nuanez.

The district’s east- and west-side schools are separated by a gap created by Loop 303, Luke Air Force Base, and a number of warehouses, meaning that rearranging internal boundaries to redistribute students would likely create transportation challenges, according to Nuanez.

“We’d have to be busing kids from the extreme west side to the east side,” he said.

But redrawing internal boundaries isn’t the district’s first choice for accommodating growth on its west side. It’s hoping to open a new school with $48 million from a $100 million bond going before voters in November.

The bond is the district’s only avenue to fund an additional school as of now, according to Nuanez. “The reality exists that the additional space is needed,” he said.

In the meantime, the district already needs more classroom space to handle growth in its westernmost schools, especially Verrado Elementary, a K-5 school, and Verrado Heritage Elementary, a K-8 school. Both are in Buckeye’s Verrado community and are expected to be at full capacity this school year. Belen Soto, another Litchfield Elementary west-side school, will be well over 90% capacity this year and is projected to be at capacity next year, Nuanez said.

The district is planning to purchase portable classrooms and repurpose sections of libraries and computer rooms to create additional classroom space at Verrado Elementary and Belen Soto, he said.

Buckeye, Littleton, Liberty, Laveen elementary school districts plan for new schools

Because of the availability of alternative providers at the K-8 level — especially charter schools — enrollment growth in the southwest Valley’s K-8 districts is “much more measured than what we would expect it to be based on the number of housing units that are being added,” said Rick Brammer, an economic consultant with Applied Economics.

Still, several southwest Valley elementary school districts are preparing to open new schools to accommodate their projected growth.

Littleton Elementary School District is planning to open a new school in Avondale’s Alamar community for the 2023-24 school year, according to its website. The Buckeye Elementary School District requested funding from the state for at least three new schools over the next six years.

Laveen Elementary, which is expecting to see a growth of around 2,100 students over the next decade, is in the process of acquiring land for two new schools, according to Superintendent Jeff Sprout.

Liberty Elementary, which has seven schools across Buckeye and Goodyear, will need two additional schools in the next six years to accommodate its projected growth, according to Superintendent Cort Monroe. The district has been allocated about $23 million from the state for its eighth school and is putting a bond proposal on the November ballot to fund the remaining $14.5 million needed to construct it. The bond includes an additional $16.7 million for a ninth school.

Increasing physical space isn’t the only challenge that comes with rising enrollment.

Hiring teachers has been a challenge for all school districts, said Nuanez, the spokesperson for Litchfield Elementary.

“We’re trying to fill all the existing positions first," Nuanez said.

Sivertson, the principal of Youngker High School in Buckeye, said they will need more teachers as they grow as a school.

“But the competition is very tough, and the volume of available teachers is tight right now," he said. “It’s very challenging.”

Sprout said Laveen Elementary is planning not just for the construction of two new schools but for the need for additional buses, technology and staffing that will come along with it.

Madeleine Parrish covers K-12 education. Do you have news to share about your school or school district? Reach her at mparrish@arizonarepublic.com and follow her on Twitter at @maddieparrish61.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Southwest Phoenix-area schools scramble to handle rapid growth