Published April 2003

Archbishop Murphy plans to expand campus

Snohomish County Business Journal/JOHN WOLCOTT In just three years, enrollment growth at Archbishop Murphy High School in southeast Everett has filled this main classroom and gym building to capacity, along with several modular classrooms. Fund raising is under way for another classroom building and improvements to the school’s athletic fields.

By John Wolcott
SCBJ Editor

Administrators at Archbishop Murphy High School in Everett are hopeful that construction of a two-story classroom building can begin by midyear to accommodate future growth, but fund raising is the key to that goal.

Despite a soft economy, nearly half of the $1.5 million needed for the new building and improvements to the school’s athletic fields already has been pledged, primarily by the school’s 14 board members, said Capital Campaign Director Pat Doud. At least 75 percent of the goal must be met before construction can begin.

“We’re still in the quiet period of our Building Leaders campaign,” Doud said. “We’ll soon be contacting parents and others, although we know the parents already contribute $6,615 in tuition plus much of their time to the school.”

The general public also has been supportive of the school, even though many of the donors have no children enrolled there, he said, “but they believe in quality education and what it does for the future of the whole community.”

The sluggish economy “has made fund raising more difficult this year,” Doud said, noting that “several regular donors at the five-to-six-digit level have said they can do something for us but not what they used to do. … It makes sense to build in phases rather than launch a multimillion-dollar campaign.”

There is no choice but to push on with the campaign, school officials said, since the school is at capacity in its main classroom-gym-and-administration building and several adjacent modular classrooms. At the same time, student applications for the school continue to grow faster than the school can accommodate them, Principal Kristine Brynildsen-Smith said.

After opening in 1988 as Holy Cross High School, in the former grade school at Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish in Everett, with 23 students, growth spurred the move to a permanent campus in southeast Everett, close to Mill Creek, in 1999.

Today there are 309 students at the college-prep school, but studies of population growth in the school’s service area show a potential for as many as 1,931 students from Snohomish County’s 10,815 Catholic families and the 68,769 Catholic households in King County. The school also serves Skagit and Island counties. Plus, 28 percent of today’s students are not Catholic, indicating a strong potential for even more applicants.

“The potential is great, but we’re primarily concerned with being able to serve about 600 students. Studies show that an 800 enrollment is optimal for the best revenue level, but 400 students is the best level for academic performance, so we’ve chosen to focus on 600 students as our best size,” Brynildsen-Smith said, noting that the present teacher-to-student ratio is one-to-15.

The new building would provide space for increasing enrollment to 400 to 450 students, while a third classroom building planned for the 22-acre site would support the school’s optimum 600-student enrollment, Doud said.

For now, the building project expected to begin later this year would provide space for the cafeteria, which now uses a tarp-covered section of the gym’s basketball court at mealtimes; three finished classrooms; administration offices; and secured storage areas, all on the ground floor.

The top floor would be sealed off for now, Doud said, to reserve space for future growth, “space built at today’s costs to make the project more economical.”

The cost of the 24,300-square-foot structure is anticipated to be $849,697, about $35 per square foot, with the finishing of the sports complex fields costing $278,000, including space for baseball, softball and soccer.

More information about the school is available on the Internet at www.archbishopmurphyhs.org.

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