The Ocean Beach School District cleared a key hurdle late last month in its years-long quest to win state funding for the construction of a new earthquake- and tsunami-safe school in Ilwaco.

At a March 27 meeting, the Washington State Department of Enterprise Services’s Project Review Committee approved OBSD’s request to combine the design and construction phases of the project into a single contract. The move clears the way for the hiring of a general contractor, and the district put out a request for qualifications, or RFQ, earlier this month.

This development comes on the heels of OBSD being awarded $3.1 million from Washington’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction last October for conceptual and schematic design. In December, the school board contracted with Seattle-based Mahlum Architects for architectural services.

The pursuit of state funding to provide the bulk of the dollars necessary to build an earthquake-resistant school on district-owned property in Ilwaco began back in 2022, when OBSD was chosen as one of just a few school districts to participate in the state’s new School Seismic Safety grant program. The program provides funds to school districts to cover the majority of the costs of retrofitting or relocating schools situated in high seismic areas or tsunami inundation zones.

The OSPI-ran program was established by the state legislature in 2022 with an initial $100 million in funding. The legislation states that at least two-thirds of the total cost must be contributed by the state, and OBSD will be pushing for the state’s share to be as high as possible.

The district was initially awarded $128,750 from OSPI as part of the first of the program’s three phases, which involved conducting geotechnical surveys and architectural site assessments at the IHS and Hilltop Middle School properties in order to determine the condition of both the buildings as well as the soils they sit on.

Current phase
OBSD is currently in the program’s second phase, which focuses on planning and designing the prospective school. Winning unanimous approval from the Project Review Committee last month to proceed with what’s known as a “GC/CM” model — where a general contractor is hired during the design phase, acting as a construction manager who is able to advise on issues like scheduling and pricing — keeps the district’s plans on track.

“Because of the nature of the project we’re looking at doing, where you’re going to have students occupying the site and we’re going to have a very tight budget because we’re looking at state funding, the idea is to do this ‘GC/CM’ method, which brings the contractor on really early,” said OBSD Superintendent Amy Huntley. “And you have to have approval to do that construction process in the state of Washington.”

The district in early April put out an RFQ for general contractors who may be interested in the project. A pre-submittal conference was held on April 16, where interested contractors received a walkthrough of the project. Huntley expects a final decision to be made in late May or early June after bids have been received, with the school board formally making the hire at its June meeting if things stay on schedule.

“You’re really looking at a couple of years of designs, plans, all of those things,” said Huntley, “and in that time we’ll be pushing the state to fulfill their obligations of what they promise to pay and whatever else needs to happen…this is a project that should predominantly be paid for with state seismic funds.”

The district plans to ramp up community engagement as the planning and design process continues, Huntley said, adding that she’s aware of concerns people may have about middle and high school students attending school under the same roof.

“As a superintendent, teacher and as a parent, I’ve [been there] for when we had a 7-12 school at the current campus,” she said. “It’s definitely important to preserve more separation than we had before between middle and high school students. It’s not our intent to just throw them back into a junior and senior high school, where everybody’s together.”