A penny saved is a school earned: Erie opens new $18M, fully funded elementary school

ERIE – After over a decade of planning and saving, a ribbon-cutting ceremony Monday officially opened the doors to the Erie School District’s new elementary school.

According to Erie CUSD 1 Superintendent Chuck Milem, the $18 million project was funded through years of saving money from the school’s 1% Facility Sales Tax and the city’s personal property replacement taxes.

“We had a substantial increase in our CPPRT over that span of Covid, which was abnormally large revenue,” Milem said. “We decided to use it as a one-time expenditure. We saved all that, and then we were blessed to be able to pay for this. It doesn’t seem possible to have something nice and debt free but here we are.”

Principal Kali Livengood said the school features classrooms for grades pre-K through fourth, with overhead garage doors left open to flow into common areas for collaborative learning and play. She said that after visiting multiple schools for inspiration, the staff fell in love with a school design they had seen in the Quad-Cities.

“We wanted to focus on a collaborative environment where we could teach kids how to work together and learn as a community,” Livengood said. “These collaborative spaces are used for when kids want to work with a partner or have to work with an adult, or for inside recess and different things, as a way to bring the classroom and have it flow inside to outside.”

Erie Elementary also has a “light court” – an indoor playground with no roof, allowing for sunshine and natural air, and a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) learning facility that Milem said used to be the school’s former agriculture shop.

“Our architects did an amazing transformation with the old ag shop,” Milem said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Eight-year-old Erie Elementary student Ember Coers agreed.

“I’m really excited to check out STEM,” Ember said.

Ember’s 6-year-old brother, Jack Coers, had only one thing on his mind.

“Tiny Town,” Jack said with a smile.

Tiny Town is a play space for the school’s younger children featuring a mock town of tiny buildings including a market, clinic, diner, school, gas station, mobile home, fitness center, construction site and more.

“That was all paid for with our preschool grant,” Milem said. “It is very unique and not everybody has one.”

Milem said the new school solved two problems for the district.

“We had two buildings that were built in the 1950s that we hadn’t touched in a long time, and they needed extensive work,” Milem said. “So, the idea was to renovate one and knock down the other. We chose this site because it has the bigger gym and some other nicer things.”

The project was developed in stages by more than a dozen contractors, including Estes Construction, Ragan Mechanical and Tri-City Electric.

“This building used to have our high school students for arts and for shop and the wrestling room,” Milem said. “The first phase was putting an addition on our high school so we could get the kids out of here. Phase two was relocating our pre-K and kindergarten students so we could empty this building and then do it all. Phase three will be across the street where we’ll be demoing the old building, adding parking and making a nice playground and green space.”

Milem said the third phase will begin next summer following the building’s abatement and hopes to have bidding out sometime after the start of 2025. Erie students started their first day at the new school on Tuesday, Oct. 15.