The St. Vrain Valley school board this week approved the attendance boundary for the new PK-8 school that’s being built in Mead to relieve crowding at Mead Elementary and Mead Middle School.

The new two-story school, which is under construction behind Mead High School, is set to open in fall 2026. The $81 million school is part of St. Vrain Valley’s $739.8 million capital construction bond issue approved by voters in November. The plan is to open the school with grades preschool through sixth, adding seventh grade in year two and eighth grade in year three. The school will be built to accommodate up to 1,100 students.

Planning Director Brendan Willits proposed two boundary scenarios for community feedback, then recommended the boundary that was approved by the school board at its Wednesday meeting.

The new boundary uses Colo. 66 as the dividing line for boundary between the new school and the existing schools. Students north of Colo. 66 will attend Mead Elementary and Mead Middle, while students south of Colo. 66 will attend the new PK-8. Students in both attendance areas will continue to be zoned to attend Mead High.“We got a lot of feedback on 66 being a very logical split,” Willits said.

He said using Colo. 66 sets up an attendance area that relieves enrollment pressure on Mead Elementary and Mead Middle, supports high enough enrollment numbers at the new school and reduces the number of students crossing the highway. Last school year, Mead Elementary was at 128% of capacity with 817 K-5 students and used 10 modular classrooms, while Mead Middle was at 112% of capacity with 571 students.

About 53% of students live north of Highway 66, and 47% live south. More housing developments are planned south of Colo. 66 that will balance the new school’s future student population, Willits said. “We want to solve not just our current problems, but our future problems,” he said.

The second scenario, which wasn’t recommended, would have expanded the new school boundary to include the neighborhood southeast of Colo. 119 and County Line Road, which includes Springs at Sandstone Ranch and the Sandstone Vista Apartments. Students in that area now attend three different elementaries: Grand View, Indian Peaks and Rocky Mountain.

Concerns included that adding those students could lead to crowding at the new school.

As new developments come online, Willits added, the approved attendance areas create logical future boundary options east of I-25. Within the Mead schools’ boundary, there are about 1,000 approved housing lots that are available to start building, plus more than 10,000 housing lots in the municipal planning process but not yet approved, he said.

Future St. Vrain school sites include an elementary site west of County Road 7 and south of Highway 66 in Liberty Ranch and an elementary site east of I-25 and north of Weld County Road 32 in Meadow Ridge. The district also is in negotiations for a PK-8 site within the Barefoot Lakes subdivision, east of I-25 and north of County Road 28.

“What we don’t want to do is bounce students from boundary to boundary to boundary,” Willits said.

While the school board approved an new attendance boundary, the district plans to give all current Mead Elementary and Mead Middle students the option to remain at their current schools during the 2026-27 school year. The district would continue to provide transportation for one year to both schools for those students.

In other business, the school board agreed to move forward with negotiating to buy the five-floor, 32,000-square-foot office building at 825 Delaware Ave. in Longmont that’s now leased to house the district’s Business Services Center. The district plans to use interest earnings from invested proceeds from the 2024 bond issue to pay the $6.3M purchase price.

The school board would need to provide its support on the final terms before the district would close on the purchase, district officials said.