Liberty Classical Academy’s expansion plans raise concerns in northern Washington County

Mary Divine, Pioneer Press
·11 min read

People who live near Liberty Classical Academy in Hugo say the school, which moved part of its lower-school programming to the former Withrow Elementary School building two years ago, has been a good neighbor.

The private Christian academy splits its students between the former Withrow school and rented space at the Church of St. Pius X in White Bear Lake. Its 190 preschool through second-grade students are in the Withrow building; its 280 students in grades 3-12 are at St. Pius X.

Liberty officials purchased the former Withrow building in 2021 from Stillwater Area Public Schools for $1.4 million. At the time of the purchase, Liberty officials said their goal was to have all preschoolers through 12th-graders on one campus in three to five years. “God has great plans for Liberty, and we are just getting started,” officials wrote in a Facebook post at the time.

To that end, Liberty officials bought the neighboring 88-acre Zahler farm for $1.5 million in transactions that occurred in November 2022 and January 2023, according to Washington County property records. Part of the farmland is in Hugo; the rest is in May Township.

Neighbors who live in the area are worried about the school’s plans for future expansion, citing concerns about an increase in traffic and its proposed subsurface sewage treatment system.

“It’s overdesigned for what they need for an elementary school,” said David Truax, a longtime Hugo resident who lives a mile north of the school. “This is a suburban campus that is being put in a cornfield that is miles away from city water and city sewer.”

School officials earlier this year submitted the first phase of plans to the Hugo City Council for approval. The plans call for an approximately 33,500-square-foot building addition to the existing school and associated parking on the Withrow property, which is located at 10158 122nd St. N. The Hugo City Council approved the plans, which will effectively double the size of the school building, at its June 3 council meeting.

Liberty officials hope to move the school’s high school students to the new addition, which will include a varsity gym, in time for the start of school in the fall of 2025, said Rebekah Hagstrom, the school’s founder and headmaster. Students in grades 3-8 would remain at St. Pius X, she said.

School officials on Thursday will be asking the May Township Board to approve plans for a sewage treatment system and stormwater management facilities that are proposed to be located in May Township.

The proposed sewage treatment system, which will service the existing school and proposed addition, also must be permitted by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency since the proposed system will have a flow greater than 10,000 gallons per day. The new system is being built to handle up to 10,375 gallons per day, “which barely exceeds the need for MPCA oversight,” Hagstrom said. “We are required to build redundancy into the system, which means it will not be used to full capacity.”

Liberty officials have spoken with the three neighbors who abut the area where the proposed sewage treatment system would be located and “have received letters of support from all three,” Hagstrom said.

But Truax and others are lobbying the May Township Board to carefully consider the plans, saying they don’t fit in with the township’s “rural character.”

“This is a wastewater treatment facility that is the equivalent of a small town in rural Minnesota,” Truax said. “All this on an 80-acre site.”

Future plans

Withrow was one of three elementary schools that the Stillwater school board voted in March 2016 to close. Between 2017 and 2022, the building sat empty.

Hugo City Administrator Bryan Bear said city officials were happy to have the building become a school again. A developer in 2019 proposed turning the school into veterans housing, but the school is not zoned for housing and does not have city water or sewer.

“When Withrow closed, there was a lot of concern about what might happen to the property,” Bear said. “What we heard loud and clear from the community was that they wanted it to be a school. Since opening there, we feel that Liberty Classical Academy has been a good fit for the community, and it seems to have been a compatible use so far. We’ve been pleased to have them here.”

According to the school’s website and Facebook page, the academy was founded in 2003 and “balances challenging academics and a Christian worldview.” Tuition ranges from $9,570 for kindergarten to $15,080 for high school.

Liberty officials have publicly shared plans for a permanent pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade campus that could house 850 students and would include a commons area, chapel, a long driveway and drop-off area and ball fields, but Liberty is not seeking permitting for the complete facility at this time, Bear said.

“The (Hugo) City Council, in approving the building addition, was pretty clear with school (officials) that they have some work to do in creating future plans,” he said. “There should be no assumption by anybody that any future plans would be approved.”

Sandra Knaeble, who lives in Grant, said Liberty officials have not done enough to reach out to neighbors who will be affected by the expansion.

“Much of the local population is still unaware of the impacts heading their way,” she said. “It would be nice to see a sign that says ‘Future home of Liberty Classical Academy’s wastewater treatment facility’ (on 122nd Street North). I think people would notice that.”

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The school’s planned sewage treatment system “has the capacity to serve well over 1,000 people,” she said. “It basically is what you would need for a high-density development. That would be like having 228 homes on that 80 acres if each home has five people living in it. Well, the maximum number of houses that May Township would allow on 80 acres is eight houses. They are looking at wastewater treatment for a far higher number. It’s very clear that it does not fit the rural nature of this area.”

Knaeble said she also is worried about the “visual blight” of a large sewage treatment system in the neighborhood.

She hopes the May Township Board will turn down the school’s request to build a sewage treatment system in the township. “Once phase 1 is approved, then everything is going to start happening,” she said. “It’s going to be much, much harder to stop.”

Another school option

Town Board Chairman John Pazlar said township officials have heard from a number of concerned residents about Liberty’s expansion plans.

“Generally, I think most folks agree that if we can expand the educational opportunities in northern Washington County, that’s good for the township,” he said. “What seems to be drawing concerns is the size and scale of a K-12 campus — the impervious surface of parking lots, the traffic impacts, the sewage treatment facility, the additional structure for housing pumps and that sort of thing, the stormwater retention pond, the mounds, the athletic fields. Just the totality of that is drawing some concerns.”

But Pazlar said having another school option so close to the township is a good thing.

Township residents didn’t have many nearby options available to them after the Stillwater Area school district closed Marine Elementary School and Withrow Elementary School in the spring of 2017. Now, township residents have three schools in the area, he said.

“It’s fair to say that it’s a good era right here right now with River Grove Charter School, with Marine Village school that is thriving and with this school to fill the old Withrow School,” he said. “If you’re a parent in May Township, you probably have more educational options than you ever had.”

Sheryl Ferguson lives directly east of the school in Hugo on 122nd Street North. The farm that Liberty purchased used to belong to her maternal grandfather, Eugene Zahler, she said.

“I went to Withrow School. I’m glad and I’m happy that it’s a school. Absolutely,” she said. “My mom was a cook at that school; my grandma was a cook at that school.”

A small rural elementary school is one thing, but a pre-K through 12th-grade school campus that could one day have 850 students and more than 100 staff is another story, according to Ferguson. “When I heard that, I thought, ‘OK, now we’re at 1,000 people. We’re not rural anymore,” said Ferguson, who has held neighborhood meetings in her garage to share news about the school’s expansion plans.

“My goal is not to change people’s minds about the school,” she said. “My goal is to let people know that this is happening in their community. I think that they should be aware. How will it affect traffic? How about water? How about taxes?”

Ferguson said she and other neighbors are concerned that school officials are in the process of “setting up infrastructure now for phase 2.”

“That’s our worry,” she said. “What is going to stop them from saying ‘No’ to phase 2 when they have everything ready for it.”

Kelly Williams, who lives on a 10-acre farm a half-mile south of the school, said she is worried about an increase in traffic on the area’s “narrow, little county roads.”

Williams is a preservation breeder of an endangered horse breed called Nokota, and she relies on regular hay deliveries from a neighboring farmer. “We could have an additional 800 cars a day, and I don’t know how farmers are going to get down these roads with their farm equipment,” she said.

Withrow Elementary School was “a beloved community school, and people in the neighborhood sent their kids there,” she said. “(Liberty) is $15,000 a year per student, which really doesn’t serve this community. Once they get a foothold, it’s going to be a massive expansion. They should go someplace that has infrastructure to support it.”

‘Serving families’

Roughly 90 percent of the students who attend Liberty “live within a 20-minute drive of the Hugo campus,” Hagstrom said. “One-third come from right around the Hugo area. We are serving families who live here.”

Most students either carpool or take a bus to school from the St. Pius site, she said.

Plans for the first phase of the expansion call for the entrance of the school to move from 122nd Street to Keller Avenue, and Liberty will pay to have right-turn lanes installed at the intersection and at the entrance, Hagstrom said. “The current entrance no longer meets code because it is too close to the intersection,” she said. “Washington County officials have told us that moving our entrance to Keller would add only 5.8 percent of the total capacity of Keller.”

Liberty officials have raised $12 million of the $20 million needed to fund the first phase of the expansion — the 33,500-square-foot addition to the school’s current building.

Any possible future expansion plans beyond that depend on fundraising and enrollment growth, she said. Although school officials had originally hoped expansion might occur in three to five years, Hagstrom said they later realized “the timeline is going to have be much more flexible.”

“It could be years down the road, or it could never happen,” she said. “It’s just so hard to know. But, as our architect likes to say, it’s prudent to plan ahead and to be thinking about the future. We did, in good faith, submit future phase plans to the city of Hugo. However, they understood that we’re really only looking at this next phase, which is the addition onto the current school.”

Most of the growth at Liberty has come in the lower grades, she said. “People are starting to realize that the public schools may not align with their values or meet their children’s academic needs,” she said.

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Hagstrom said she hopes the school will become a “center of the community” — a place where local families come to use the playground and walk on its nature paths.

“We really do hope to be good neighbors,” she said. “Our design is meant to blend in with the natural beauty of the surroundings, and any future phases are centrally located in the property in order to be less visible.”

But Knaeble said Liberty officials are going to have a hard sell.

“We really object to the development as currently designed,” Knaeble said. “We don’t object to schools; we don’t object to children. We simply object to what is a high-density development. It doesn’t have a place here.”