Room to Grow

The Berryville School District officially got the go-ahead last week to move forward with construction of a new pre-kindergarten building on its west campus.

At a special called meeting on Friday, March 3, the Berryville Planning and Zoning Commission unanimously approved the district’s development plan for the new building. The decision will allow the district to obtain the necessary building permit for the project.

The approval came after Berryville superintendent Owen Powell presented the commission with the results of a traffic study that commissoners requested in August 2022. Powell also discussed the district’s plans to alleviate traffic congestion on the west campus with an eye toward student safety.

The new building will be constructed north of Bobcat Arena, Powell said.

“It’s just a grass field right now,” Powell said. “It’s really good spot for a pre-K building to go.”

Jay Lee, administrative assistant for the city, said the site “is a very flat area.”

“As far as building, I think that’s about as minimal dirt work as you can have,” Lee said.

“It’s a perfect place,” Powell said.

The new building will replace two portable buildings that currently house pre-kindergarten classes. “Right now there’s four classrooms in those two buildings,” Powell said. “There’s two in each building. And we we have three classes right now with a capability of four. … It is our plan for next year to have four classes.”

The new building will encompass 7,000 square feet, Powell said, and will have six classrooms to accommodate for future growth.

“Looking toward the future, we would like to have six pre-K classes,” he said. “Of course, that’s going to be on down the road a little bit.”

In response to a question from the commission, Powell said the plan is for pre-K students to continue being dropped off in the same location as they are now.

“What (parents) do right now is they pull up into this parking lot and they walk their students up to that building,” he said. “Under the new plan, what we would do is they would continue to come to this parking lot right here where they go right now. We would have a teacher meet them in the parking lot. The teacher would walk them through the building and over to the new the new pre-K building.”

That method, Powell said, would prevent cars and buses from mixing in the parking lot.

“We want to keep cars and buses separate,” he said.

Powell said the district contracted with an engineering firm to conduct the traffic study requested by the commission. The firm made recommendations to alleviate traffic bottlenecks on the west campus — some of which Powell said he liked and some of which he didn’t.

Among the suggestions Powell said the district could look at implementing are eliminating some curbing and widening an exit from two to three lanes.

The district also will look into the use of electronic sensors that will let school personnel know when a student’s ride has arrived in the pickup line, which Powell said should speed up the pickup process in the afternoon and alleviate traffic congestion.

Ultimately, Powell said, the district would like to add a new road that he said would “greatly improve traffic.”

“But this will take some time and it will take some money, too, to build a new road,” he said. “… Moving forward to the future, we do want to build a new road to come out on Freeman (Avenue).”

Building a new road would be at least a couple of years away, Powell said.

“We know that a new road is going to fix the problem,” he said. “But I would like to see how these electronic devices and widening out these current roads and see what that does.”

Powell said the district is probably three to four months away from breaking ground on the new building. Construction would take eight to nine months, meaning the building likely will be finished in time for the 20242025 school year.

The current portable buildings will be removed to make room for a playground expansion.