By Bay StephensEBS
Staff Writer
BIG SKY – The Big Sky School
District Board of Trustees continues to investigate the feasibility of
partnering with Habitat for Humanity to build two triplexes on school property
to provide housing for district faculty and staff.
At the Jan. 13 BSSD board meeting, Chair
Loren Bough emphasized that the board is in the “feasibility process” of
determining whether building six units on school property is possible in terms
of permitting and financing. If the board gains full assurance that it can
build the housing and ascertain the exact cost, it would then bring the
proposal to the community to ask for general approval as well as financial and
volunteer support since it’s an attempt by the school to address a wider
community need, said BSSD Superintendent Dustin Shipman.
Depending on permitting and
financing, groundbreaking could take place this spring with construction
wrapping up in October, according to David Magistrelli, executive director of Habitat
for Humanity of Gallatin Valley.
“We think that’s feasible,”
Magistrelli told the board on Jan. 13.
Housing for teachers has been a
perennial challenge in Big Sky, such that on two occasions Anne Marie
Mistretta, BSSD superintendent from 2005-2010, put up teachers in her own home,
according to a March 2017 EBS story on the “Penny for Housing” bill shut down
at the state Senate.
Shipman has expressed the
challenges of recruiting and retaining teachers in the face of the housing that
is not only expensive, but scarce. He said there is a three to five year “shelf
life” for the teachers commuting from Bozeman or Belgrade before they leave the
Big Sky school system.
“They just start to seek employment
closer to home,” Shipman said. “And every school in Gallatin County is growing,
so there’s a lot of opportunity. The board is laser focused on helping with
this [issue],” Shipman said, “and if this [project] doesn’t work out we’ll go
back to the drawing board.”
Shipman met with Laura Seyfang,
program director of the Human Resource and Development’s Big Sky Community
Housing Trust, and with Magistrelli in October to discuss options for a
partnership between district and Habitat. Seyfang, who has worked with Habitat
for Humanity in the past, said she approached Shipman with the idea for the
housing project when she heard the school had its own land, a scarce resource
that has made it difficult for the humanitarian organization to build in Big
Sky.
According to Shipman, the school
district owns approximately 28 acres and is considering locations for the
triplexes south of the high school, off Beaver Creek Road near the school’s tennis
courts.
Unlike other developments Habitat
for Humanity builds, the organization would not own this project, but would instead
facilitate the construction process to provide housing owned by the school
district. The district would then rent to teachers, although it hasn’t gone
through the process of deciding who would live in the units and how much rent
would be, Shipman said.
Shipman said a price range for the
project is unknown at this point because all the project’s permitting and
construction variables must first be determined. However, by virtue of working
with Habitat for Humanity, building the units would be significantly cheaper
than market price, he said. Shipman added that the district hopes to have the
total project cost determined by the Feb. 21 school board meeting.
At a Nov. 12 board meeting, the
board agreed to invest $2,000 for Habitat for Humanity to draft a memorandum of
understanding and move forward in determining what a housing project on school
property might entail. Habitat also received an anonymous $5,000 restricted
donation designated specifically for BSSD’s project.
With the combined $7,000, Habitat
for Humanity has hired ThinkOne Architecture, which is developing interior
renderings for the school board to review, and Allied Engineering, which conducted
a geotechnical analysis of the potential site on Jan. 16 to determine the
appropriate type of foundation.
Magistrelli will meet with the county
planning department on Jan. 24 in hopes of learning what type of permitting the
project would require, whether there are restrictions concerning connecting the
units to Beaver Creek Road, and what water and sewer adjustments the project
would need.
