Lee’s Summit Schools eye new home for Hazel Grove Elementary near planned park
Plans for a stretch of Colbern Road near Highway 350 will soon bring a swath of new activity to the northwest side of Lee’s Summit, including a new elementary school and park.
The Lee’s Summit School District recently publicly identified a site in the corridor near the Unity Village complex for the district’s new Hazel Grove Elementary School building, and last month, the district submitted early plans to the city for the project.
That location is adjacent to property that has been eyed as a unique new city park, and both sites are just west of the sprawling Discovery Park development, where work is underway on a new mixed-use district.
New school site
The new Hazel Grove Elementary building, which would replace the current, aging school, is among a group of projects funded by a $225 million school district bond approved by voters last year. The district has estimated the Hazel Grove project will cost around $44.5 million.
Plans filed with the city last month show the prospective site for the new elementary school as a 30-acre, undeveloped property adjacent to the Unity Villa Apartments across Colbern Road from Unity Village.
A document filed with the city indicates the school building would be around 79,000 square feet. Plans show classrooms, staff and administration space, collaboration areas, a cafeteria and a gym in a building set back off Blue Parkway and Colbern Road. Both roadways would have entrances to the school campus.
School district officials first unveiled the site at a Lee’s Summit City Council meeting in January, in which council members signed off on the purchase and waived payments the school district would have to make to the city for the site because of a special taxing district used to fund road work in the area.
Superintendent David Buck told City Council members then that the district had looked at seven total sites in Kansas City, Unity Village and Lee’s Summit for the school.
“We chose this one because A, it lays the best, and B, it gets us farther away from heavy traffic,” he said. “We want elementaries to set back, we want middle schools and high schools to be on major arteries.”
District spokeswoman Katy Bergen told The Star that the purchase of the site has not yet been finalized and said district officials hope to close on the property in the next month or two. The property is currently owned by a real estate LLC associated with the Unity religious group.
At their meeting on Thursday, school board members signed off on a nearly $2 million contract with Incite Design Studio for engineering and design work for the Hazel Grove project. The school will be built based on plans already completed for the new Greenwood Elementary School (also a $44.5 million new school funded by the 2025 bond), saving the district $1 million, Bergen said.
New park plans
The potential Hazel Grove site sits just west of a 30-acre wooded property where Lee’s Summit parks officials have worked through plans for a new city park.
In a presentation to City Council and Parks and Recreation board members in January, Steve Casey, Lee’s Summit Parks and Recreation’s superintendent of park planning and construction, said a recently completed master plan for the site included concepts of hiking and mountain biking trails, as well as play areas and a “tree top village.”
“We’re not going to be able to build soccer fields and baseball fields out here because of the terrain,” he said. “It’s probably 95% wooded, so we wanted to be, obviously, very environmentally conscious and be in a conservation mode with this development project.”
“We really feel like this is a once opportunity to do something that’s really unique that we don’t see in our parks,” he said. “It’s really driven by the fact that the site offers that to us, it’s not intended to be developed with soccer fields and football fields, but it’s nature themed, it’s oriented around the site. Let’s use the topography and the vegetation to develop something unique.”
Discovery Park
Both of those sites sit just west of Discovery Park, a 268-acre development that’s expected to be home to apartments, hotels, restaurants, businesses and a quarter-mile riverwalk, built in phases. Altogether, the development is expected to have 3.9 million square feet of “live, work, stay and play space.”
Construction is rolling along at the site near the Colbern Road-Douglas Street intersection off Interstate 470, and Crown Veterinary Services became the first business to open in the development in January.
