VOLGA – Sioux Valley Schools is looking for a little more elbow room come 2018, following high enrollment and the looming need to add more sections of some grades.

In the past year, enrollment’s gone up by 30-35 students, a significant number for the school district. The student population now stands at 670.

With grade populations increasing, there’s a need to keep class sizes down to a reasonable number. Already, some need to be reduced in size, and more will as long as Volga’s population trends continue.

And Sioux Valley School District Superintendent Laura Schuster expects them to. “We also have to take into account the city issued 50-plus building permits for new houses, and we’ve had some strategic planning meetings with the city and community. It’s pretty evident that Volga will continue to grow.”

So the school district will have a nearly 18,000-square-foot addition built onto the school building and another 2,800 square feet in remodeled existing space. The total project is estimated to cost $4 million.

At the moment, architects are about 50 percent done with drawings and schematics, according to Schuster, with all of that to be done ahead of mid-April, when the district would begin the issuance of bids.

Construction would begin once school’s out in the last week of May and continue throughout the 2017-2018 school year, with plans to complete work by June 2018.

The addition will extend from the entrance of the elementary wing of the school to the north, into where the tennis courts now are located. At the moment, there’s no definitive plan for replacing them.

“We’ll have to have some discussions with the city, and we have already. I’m hoping down the road that the tennis court will be relocated,” Schuster said.

The softball and baseball fields won’t be impacted by the addition.

A multipurpose room will be built onto the south side of the elementary entrance.

Junior kindergarten up to the third grade will move to the addition and its 11 new classrooms. Other grades will then be able to shift around, giving them much needed space again. The fourth and fifth grade would move into where those elementary grades are now, then allowing the high school to gain some rooms as well.

“Ultimately, we would be looking at a three-section school, K-8,” Schuster said. “Right now, we have two of those grades – our current second grade and our current third grade – already in three sections, and we have a couple more grades that are right on the bubble.”

To pay for it, funds from the district’s capital outlay will be utilized, with no need for a tax increase.

“We’re going to do this project within our current capital outlay budget, so for this particular project, we will not have to levy additional dollars,” Schuster said. “That’s been a positive. The community believes this is a need and the people that are actively involved in the community understand that Volga’s pretty vibrant right now and we’re growing.”

There are several uses in mind for the new multipurpose room, each intended to alleviate congestion elsewhere.

At the moment, the school has one lunch area where more than 500 students have to be in the span of two hours. Having younger grades go to the multipurpose room for their lunch would go a long way to keeping the main cafeteria space usable for the growing school.

The multipurpose room could also serve as a space for BASE (the Before & After School Enrichment) program as well as a place to host some P.E. classes for junior kindergarten and kindergarten.

Then there’s the remodeled portion of the existing elementary wing to be considered. This will mostly involve remodeling the entrance to the elementary section, upping security in keeping with modern trends.

The main feature of the planned security upgrade will simply be to make it so that during school hours, people coming into the school building will have to go through the office area before they can continue on to the rest of the school.

“With this particular design, once the school day starts, that second set of doors will be closed and locked and they would have to access the building through the office, which is what many schools are going to,” Schuster said.

Of course, the work on the building will come with its challenges, but with efforts taken to ensure that intrusion is kept to a minimum, Schuster said they’ll make it through the 2017-2018 school year just fine.

“There’s always a little bit of apprehension about moving and we know there’s going to be some disruption in the next school year, some noise, some mess. … The staff has been very open-minded. They’re excited and appreciative of the fact that we’re bringing them along in the process and asking for feedback, so it’s been good and positive.”

Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.