Shawnee Mission schools approves buying Entercom site in Westwood

It could be years until the Shawnee Mission School District replaces the aging Westwood View Elementary School, but at least it now has a future home.

School board members on Monday approved buying 6.5 acres at 50th Street and Belinder Avenue in Westwood, just west and across the street from the current school site. The purchase price was around $1.4 million.

The property currently contains two radio towers that broadcast AM radio stations KMBZ and KUDL and an office complex that has been mostly vacant since Entercom Communications moved its offices and studios to Mission. It is across the street from Westwood View.

School Superintendent Jim Hinson said Westwood View is almost 50 years old and will need to be replaced. While he said there was no timetable for construction, district officials saw that the Entercom property was available and wanted to buy it while they could.

There have been a number of proposed uses for the land, including a senior living community.

“We’re certainly landlocked there (at Westwood View), and when that occurs around our school sites and we know there’s going to be a need sometime in the future, we don’t want property like that to escape from us,” he said after the meeting.

Westwood Mayor John Ye told the board that city officials have long feared the district would close Westwood View, which he said is key to the city’s identity. He said the purchase marks a sense of stability for the city’s future.

“This represents a substantial change of epic proportions in Westwood,” said Ye, who was joined by several members of the city council. “Everything begins with our school.”

Hinson announced that the district is drawing up agreements that would give the city the rights of first refusal to buy either the Entercom site or the current Westwood View site if the district chooses to sell them.

Westwood resident Jim Orr said he lives about a block away from the Entercom site and welcomed the district’s acquisition of the land for a school. However, Orr noted that Westwood is a small city with limited ability to raise revenue and warned against quickly giving city officials greater opportunity to take property off the tax rolls.

“Run the schools,” Orr said, “but entering into such tangling alliances without having a more full understanding of all of the implications would be premature at best and foolhardy at worst.”

This wasn’t the only property purchase approved Monday. The board also voted to buy 6.4 acres at 6445 Carter Ave. in Merriam for $1.5 million. Hinson said the purchase would allow the district to combine the warehouse and operation and maintenance functions of the district on one site.

Both purchases were listed in the board meeting’s consent agenda, which adopts dozens of items at once and often with little discussion. After the meeting, Hinson defended approving large property purchases through the consent agenda, saying the law requires only that the vote to buy property be conducted during a board business meeting open to the public.

In other business, the board voted unanimously to begin limiting the number of foreign exchange students the district can accept each year. The current rules essentially allow an unlimited number of foreign exchange students to enroll if they are sponsored by a nationally recognized exchange student program. The new rule will allow district officials to limit the number depending on total enrollment, class size and other factors.

Board members also unanimously approved changing the borders of the Nieman Elementary School area to reassign students living between 75th and 79th streets from Interstate 35 to Nieman Road to Shawanoe Elementary School. Hinson said the move, required to eliminate crowding that has forced the district to use mobile units at Nieman Elementary, will affect 48 students.

The board also heard criticism from Brian Koon, a lobbyist for Kansas Families for Education, who noted a published report that among Johnson County school districts, Shawnee Mission had the highest number of administrators making more than $100,000 a year. He also criticized pay raises for administrators at a time when state education funding was in danger and most teachers have seen their pay frozen. The comments came during the open forum portion of the meeting, and board members generally do not publicly respond to comments made in the open forum.

This story was originally published March 25, 2016 at 9:04 PM with the headline "Shawnee Mission schools approves buying Entercom site in Westwood."