The Upper Susitna Senior Center could serve as temporary digs for Susitna Valley Junior/Senior High School, which was destroyed by fire June 5, if the school's Parent Teacher Student Association has its way.
That's the same fix the group put forward in 2005, when a failing roof led the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District to propose closing the school and busing Su Valley students to other schools until the roof was replaced.
The senior center is less than a quarter mile from the school site along the Parks Highway, 58 miles north of Wasilla.
"What we've kind of done is pick up where we left off two years ago," said PTSA vice president Deb Maynard. "We would prefer not to be split up too much and sent to various and sundry places. We're living through enough of a tragedy already."
The state Fire Marshal's Office could not determine what exactly caused the blaze that destroyed the $13.23 million building, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety said Tuesday.
"There's just too many things that they can't say for certain it was this because there are other things that it potentially could have been," Megan Peters said.
The fire investigation report was due Tuesday afternoon.
School District officials say the idea of temporarily locating Su Valley in the senior center has merit.
But they and the community must weigh the pros and cons before making any decisions, they said.
The PTSA proposal involves using the center's 5,595-square-foot main building as the school's office, cafeteria and auditorium, and hauling in 20 portable classrooms. Su Valley already employed eight portables during the $5.5 million roof reconstruction that was under way when the school burned.
There's a hefty cost to that plan. Building 12 more portables would run about $1.2 million, according to Scott Schwald, the School District director of operations for maintenance and transportation.
Getting electricity to those portables and upgrading the senior center septic system to accommodate Su Valley's roughly 200 students would bring the total price tag to about $2 million, he said.
That's a bare-bones minimum, Schwald said, since other upgrades are likely as well.
The senior center has no sprinkler system, for example, and though it has a commercial kitchen, it might not meet state standards for a school kitchen, he said.
At this point, no one knows for certain just where the money for any plan would come from, said assistant superintendent George Troxel.
Su Valley was insured against fire damage but the borough has no word yet on what sort of settlement it can expect, said Borough Manager John Duffy.
What's more, Duffy said, any settlement could be long in coming, since several insurance companies are involved. The general contractor and all the subcontractors involved with the roof reconstruction project each carry their own policies, he said.
And neither the borough nor the district has designated reserve funds to cover such emergencies, said both Troxel and Duffy. Both would have to juggle funds from other programs to foot the bill, they said.
Wherever the money comes from investing $2 million in the senior center might not be a prudent approach, says Borough Mayor Curt Menard.
After all, he said, Su Valley would be there temporarily.
Though no funding source for a new school has been identified, the district has said it will rebuild Su Valley. Completion of a new school, it says, is probably about two to three years off.
In a meeting of the Borough Assembly and School Board subcommittee on school issues Tuesday, Menard suggested looking for solutions that would better serve the district's or borough's interests in the long haul.
There are other considerations too, Troxel said. Su Valley's curricular and cocurricular offerings for the next few years, he said, will be dictated by its temporary location. A basketball program, for example, might be tough to maintain at the senior center.
Those are things the PTSA might not have considered yet, he said.
"It's hard in the middle of June when basketball season is still five months off to say what is our basketball program going to look like," he said.
He said the district would involve the community in any decision about the school's future.
He has proposed Su Valley or its PTSA appoint a facilitator to lead community discussions and help highlight the pros and cons of any plan.
Borough Assemblyman Tom Kluberton, who represents the Upper Susitna Valley, supports that notion.
"We need to have some very practical constraints so we don't walk in the room and it's all pie in the sky. We need to know where the walls are," Kluberton said.
No matter where Su Valley sets up shop, Maynard said, "We've got some issues to surmount."
But, she said, "We're all pretty resilient and pretty imaginative when it comes to what we can do."
Find Becky Stoppa online at adn.com/contact/bstoppa or call 352-6708.
