PROVO — The Provo School District is quietly negotiating to purchase Nebo School District's part of the former Oakridge School.
The school, which Provo School District owns with Nebo School District and Brigham Young University, could be used for students if Timpanogos Elementary School is razed and rebuilt.
For about 30 years, Provo and Nebo school districts ran a joint special-education program at the former Oakridge School at 1165 Birch Lane in Provo. (It is not to be confused with a new Oakridge School the Nebo district opened in Springville last fall.)
The joint special-education program ended last year because the number of Nebo School District's special education students grew too large for the Provo building.
When Nebo educators vacated the former Oakridge School, Provo School District moved its special education students to other schools and used the space in the former Oakridge School for Wasatch Elementary School, which is connected to Oakridge by a walkway.
Meanwhile, Timpanogos Elementary, built in 1938, is scheduled to be razed and rebuilt in 2007-2008, if voters approve a bond issue in the June 27 election.
Provo School District has budgeted $11.3 million in bond money to rebuild Timpanogos Elementary, purchase nearby property to expand the school site, and house the students for a year elsewhere.
About $400,000 of the $11.3 million has been budgeted for the temporary housing and that money could be used to purchase the former Oakridge School, Provo School District Superintendent Randy Merrill said.
But the building is not big enough for all of Timpanogos' 597 students.
"What you do is you put the younger grades, maybe up to grade four, into the Oakridge building and then you put (grades) five and six as kind of one-year attachments to one of our other schools," Merrill said.
The district would lease portable units for the upper grades and park them at another elementary school for a year.
The former Oakridge School has been appraised and is valued at $2 1/2 million to $3 million, Merrill said.
Merrill said the negotiations with Nebo are sensitive. He could not elaborate about price and how the district will pay for Nebo's half of the building.
Nebo School District Superintendent Chris Sorensen also declined to elaborate details about the negotiations, though he is not promising to sell to Provo District.
"It has always been an interlocal agreement with BYU," Sorensen said. "And the agreement was if we decided to vacate the building, BYU has the first option to buy it."
If Provoans vote against the bond proposal, which would pay for numerous projects around the district in addition to Timpanogos, the district will not need to purchase the former Oakridge School.
And district chiefs are not ruling out other choices for housing Timpanogos students during a rebuilding.
"The choices are you can go split sessions in another school," Merrill said. "I did that when I was a kid. That's not desirable. . . . You can go on a piece of property that we have and put a bunch of portables in and you can have a kind of portable tent village."
Still, Merrill believes purchasing the former Oakridge School is the best choice.
"You have a perfect building therein, you don't mess up their schedules (as with split sessions) and the money we would have used to buy portables we'd throw into Oakridge," Merrill said. "It's just kind of a better way."
After Timpanogos is rebuilt, district could sell the former Oakridge School or use the space for other district needs.
Last fall, the district briefly considered purchasing the school for a Spanish-English dual-immersion program, in which instruction is divided between both languages, producing students who are bilingual.
However, the proposal drew criticism from parents, who said it was too expensive and not located in neighborhoods where the majority of the city's Hispanic students live.
Merrill said there are no plans to create a dual-immersion program if the district ultimately purchases the former Oakridge School.
E-mail: lhancock@desnews.com