It’s time now for the Tahoma School Board of Directors to consider its next step based on input from an ad hoc student housing committee.

The board will review the research and suggestions that the committee put together at its Nov. 8 meeting and go from there to begin the process of deciding what to do, explained district spokesman Kevin Patterson.

Committee member Kevin Kalberg reflected on the process.

“I think that we really brainstormed a whole lot, came up with some really out of the box ideas from the wacky, to the realistic to the most extreme to the most rational types of scenarios… just as options for the school board,” Kalberg said. “It was an extremely diverse group of people from staff to principals to people who just recently had family members who had lost jobs to people who were doing fairly well. My overall feeling was, we don’t know what the school board is going to do, but we vetted a whole bunch of different decisions.”

One thing the committee was able to agree on, Kalberg said, “is that we are very blessed to have a fantastic education for our children in the district.”

Kalberg has two children who attend Tahoma schools.

Tanya Donahue, who served on the committee, said the district did a great job providing everything the group needed to get the job done.

“The end results with this committee have been the same as all the others (she’s served on),” Donahue wrote in an email interview. “Everyone feels like the decision was the right choice at the time. Mutual consensus would be a good way to describe it.”

This group was formed in response to the failure April 26 of the district’s construction bond measure. The district had hoped to sell bonds to raise $120 million for maintenance, to build a fifth elementary school, add classroom space to Tahoma Junior High and Tahoma High, among other projects.

The committee began meeting shortly after the school year ended in June and met once or twice a month until its final gathering on Oct. 26 at Tahoma Junior High.

Kalberg explained the committee started out with a simple idea of how to move a group of 20 or 30 students from one place to another without considering how it would impact programs and that it developed into what needs to be done to make some of the buildings habitable.

“We called it warm, safe and dry,” he said. “What needed to be done to keep the kids warm, safe and dry.”

Among the options the committee considered were alternative schedules, moving around small groups of students or even possibly leasing space outside the district for students.

“We’re really blessed to have such a great bang for our buck out here,” Kalberg said. “We want to continue that good work so we don’t lose the momentum that we’ve created. My feeling is why shouldn’t every kid in the Tahoma School District expect a world class education?”