PORT TOWNSEND — The Port Townsend School Board has paved the way for an early learning and family support center on the Port Townsend High School campus.
On Tuesday, the board declared property on the campus as surplus and authorized Superintendent Linda Rosenbury to enter into a lease agreement with the Olympic Peninsula YMCA, which plans to construct the center on the site.
The vote was unanimous but for Board Chair Nathanael O’Hara, who abstained.
Preliminary plans for the 1.16 acre-site on the campus at 1500 Van Ness St. call for the construction of a 4,000-square-foot facility that will provide daycare for up to 40 children, a commercial kitchen for the preparation of meals for more than 100 families and resource navigation and assistance to more than 250 families.
The YMCA, the school district and Jefferson Healthcare hospital lead the collaborative project that seeks to address the lack of childcare in Port Townsend and had identified the site as having the size, location and kind of access to infrastructure that was required for such a facility.
It is the project’s location that most of the residents speaking during the meeting’s public comment period objected to, citing, among other things, increased traffic as compounding problems that already exist in the neighborhood, such as poor lighting, a lack of sidewalks and little maintenance of the streets by the city.
While acknowledging that child care was a real community need, residents said the project had moved too quickly, did not have enough local input and that the decision had already been made to locate it at the high school when they learned about it.
“I’m not against child care, but in this neighborhood, it’s just too tight,” one speaker said. “Can we put it in another place? There’s got to be a better place.”
Another speaker said that project had been pitched as a child care facility, which was not accurate.
“This is more than a daycare,” she said. “It’s a community center that will be open 12 hours a day.”
Those in support of the project site included working parents in Port Townsend who said that people like themselves needed the child care that the center would provide.
“The people who will benefit can’t be here [at the meeting] tonight because they’re working,” one speaker said.
Simon Little of StudioSTL, which is designing the center, said that the city is requiring the YMCA to conduct a traffic study before it moves ahead with the project.
The earliest the lease between the district and the YMCA could be executed is Dec. 12.
Among other actions:
Superintendent Rosenbury outlined the school board goals for the 2022-23 school year and a data-driven approach to achieving them.
The board unanimously approved a request that a $9,000 Carl Perkins grant be put toward the exterior customization of a mobile kitchen that will be a teaching and learning tool for students in the high school culinary arts program.
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Rerporter Paula Hunt can be reached at Paula.Hunt@soundpublishing.com