ZED ready to start construction on new facility

After months of delays and uncertainty, the Zumbro Education District (ZED) is ready to begin construction on its new facility in Kasson.
ZED Executive Director Patrick Gordon said that construction of the 61,000 sq. ft., $16 million building in Kasson will begin this summer and be ready for the 2022-23 school year. The building will located on Highway 57 adjacent to the Catholic Church, he said.
ZED purchased 3 acres for the facility and obtained an adjacent 3.1 acres from the Kasson-Mantorville School District.
ZED is a cooperative of seven school districts providing services to approximately 9,500 students. District programs include the Area Learning Center, Transition 2 Success, the Futures/CHOICE/Connections program and Birth to Three Early Intervention for Infants and Toddlers. In addition to the special education programs, ZED also offers student enrichment activities for students in the member districts including the Creative Writing Contest, Choral Festival, Academic Triathlon, Traveling Art Show, Science Fair and the ZED Summer Academy.
The new building will allow ZED to bring all its programs under one roof, Gordon said. Currently the district utilizes a building that it currently owns, called the South Campus, and also leases space from the Byron School District. ZED needs to vacate the leased space at the end of the 2021-22 school year, Gordon said, because the Byron district needs the space.
Gordon said that the ability to get all programs in once building was important. He also cited the benefits of owning their own building rather than leasing.
Discussions and planning for the new building began in 2019, he said.
Currently the ZED member schools include Blooming Prairie, Byron, Hayfield, Kasson-Mantorville, Pine Island, Stewartville and Triton.
The Pine Island district has declined to participate in the purchase of the new facility and will be exiting ZED at the end of the 2021-22 school year, Gordon said. He added that because of current interest rates, the district is able to build the new building with six members at a lower cost than the original projections with seven members.
The new building will provide a separate area for each of the programs operated, Gordon said. The Area Learning Center typically serves 80-90 students in grades 6-12, Gordon said, but that number goes up and down throughout the year. Students in the ALC typically have a lot of other things going on in their lives and do better in this setting, he said. Upon completion of the program, he said, they receive their diploma from their home school district.
Transition 2 Success is a special education program for those ages 18-21. The emphasis for these students, he said, is working on independent living skills and varies with each student.
The ZED South Campus is a special education school for students kindergarten through 12th grade. These students, he said, are referred to ZED by their home school district with behavorial and cognitive difficulties and require a higher staff to student ratio. The goal, he said, is to give the students the skills needed to go back to their district school.
ZED also has a variety of itinerant staff that move between the member schools. These staff members include those who are licensed to work with blind/visually handicapped, deaf or hard-of-hearing students and occupational and speech therapy.
For these staff members, Gordon said, the new facility will allow them to have a designated office space in the building, something they have not had in the past.
Joining together in a cooperative, Gordon said, allows member districts to offer programs they could not provide separately because of finances and the difficulty in hiring the specialized staff needed.
Detailed information on the new building is available on the ZED website, zumbroed.org.