Work begins on building $12 million charter middle school in Chubbuck
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CHUBBUCK — Ground was broken Monday afternoon on a new 6th- to 8th-grade charter school in Chubbuck.
Development of the Alpine Academy Charter School is expected to be completed on July 15, 2023. The school will allow the Connor Academy Charter School to switch from K-8 to a K-5 school and, in turn, create more classes and thus more space for additional students, according to principal and superintendent Joel Lovstedt.
“For us, it’s the next step,” he told EastIdahoNews.com. “By building this, we will switch 6 through 8 into this building, which will give us room to add another track of K-5 here.”
The waitlist for admission to Connor Academy includes more than 200 students, Lovstedt said. The norm for the school is to admit three or four new students to each class yearly. With the new school, total student admission will rise from 540 to around 800.
Enrollment will not immediately jump next year, however. Lovstedt said students will be added in separate phrases.
“We’re planning on phasing in over three years,” he said.
Development of the Alpine Academy will cost around $12 million, funded primarily through public bonds and federal grant money. The development of the school has been the work of a pair of Idaho-based companies. The design is the work of Hummel Architects, and construction will be completed by Big-D Construction.
Big-D site superintendent Ryan Judd told EastIdahoNews.com that he is excited to be working on this development because the subcontractors his company uses in southeastern Idaho are all local — “within 5 miles” of site, he said.
“It’s pretty awesome to be able to use all the guys that we’ve been using throughout southeast Idaho and actually be able to work within a stone’s throw of their house,” he said.
Lovstedt agreed, saying that it gives local contractors the opportunity to better their own community and have a hand in the building of a school their children may soon be attending.
The new school will feature teacher-student collaboration space and fitness, art, science, music and performance classrooms.
“With the unprecedented growth in both Pocatello and Chubbuck, the demand for enrollment at our school has never been greater,” Lovstedt said in a news release. “We hope that this new school will reduce the concern of overcrowding in other schools and are excited to be able to expand our program so that more families can be a part of our safe, high-performing academic program.”