The Aberdeen School Board has decided that Stevens Elementary’s new school won’t be moving that far away.

At Tuesday’s board meeting, the board unanimously approved the Stevens task force’s recommendation that the new school be built just south of the current Stevens building, and not in the fully-wooded area east of Lomax Street in South Aberdeen.

Since February, a task force comprised of 15, parents and school and city officials, had met regularly to consider several different sites to for a new Stevens Elementary. The school’s current building is outdated in many aspects, and the district hopes to go to taxpayers in the spring of 2019 to ask for a bond issue.

Brian Ho from TCF Architecture presented the task force’s findings at the board meeting. He explained that when considering lower costs and added benefits of staying in the same part of the community, the group decided it made more sense to not move to the Lomax Street site that is in a hilly area and would require more off site work.

“It was pretty clear there were a lot of things the Stevens site offered better than the Lomax site,” said Ho. “Certainly the Lomax site has the elevation potential, but location and a lot of the things around the existing site graded out quite a bit better.”

Initially, the task force was considering a third site in the fields northeast of Grays Harbor College’s Bishop Center. But issues with the site being on wetlands and requiring a complicated land acquisition process made the group quickly eliminate that option.

For the two remaining sites, the task force graded each on criteria such as size, access and costs, which resulted in a much higher score for the existing Stevens site.

Some of the benefits of the old Stevens site they listed were that there’re no land acquisition costs, and that it keeps the school in a familiar area for the community. Because the old Stevens site is still in the tsunami inundation zone, the task force suggested building a tsunami evacuation structure in the building that could be shared with students from the nearby Miller Junior High School in the case of a major tsunami.

One of few benefits the group listed for the Lomax site was that it was high enough to be out of the inundation zone.

According to Ho, the task force voted, with 11 members in favor of the Stevens site, zero opposed, and four who abstained.

The Stevens site is also less expensive. According to the study, the total construction cost for building at the Stevens site ranges from about $40 million to $44 million. The Lomax site would have cost anywhere from $44 million and $47 million, due primarily to higher land development costs.

According to the presentation blueprints, the new Stevens building will be built where there are currently two baseball fields at the southeast corner of Pioneer Park.