Andrea Johnson/MDN Minot school board members and administrators discuss future planning during a retreat on Monday evening at the Grand Hotel.

School board members and administrators put their heads together at a retreat Monday to try to come up with a solution for anticipated overcrowding in the Minot Public Schools.

“Everything is on the table,” Superintendent Mark Vollmer told the group.

Projections show that the larger class sizes in the lower elementary grades will eventually move up to Jim Hill and Erik Ramstad Middle Schools, which are already near or over the building capacity, and then on to the two high school campuses. Ramstad, built following the flood, doesn’t have as much available gym space as Jim Hill, which is otherwise over capacity.

But with property taxes already on the rise, another bond issue might be a hard sell.

Vollmer told the group that this would be the first of many planned meetings to gain input and a possible direction for planning.

At the retreat on Monday at the Grand Hotel, the group heard a presentation from the school district’s demographer and threw out ideas.

If some of the medical buildings in downtown Minot eventually became available after Trinity builds its new hospitals, could a former medical building be remodeled into a middle school?

“A hospital is really tough to repurpose,” architect Wayne Whitty told the group, but he didn’t entirely rule it out.

Board member Mark Lyman asked if the district’s administration building could be razed and a new school be built in its place.

Building experts suggested there might not be enough space there, though it might be possible to build a multi-storied school.

Two significant problems with building downtown would be the lack of available parking and the lack of a suitable green space area for athletic classes and extracurriculars.

Board member Miranda Schuler wondered whether there might be enough land available at Edison Elementary on the practice fields to build a middle school. Vollmer said the practice fields get quite a bit of use from teams in the community.

Experts also discussed the availability of land in the area that might be purchased to build another school. However, there seems to be both a scarcity of available land within the district boundary.

Vollmer pointed out that districts South Prairie and Nedrose both built high schools in the last few years.

Experts said some available land lies outside the Minot school district boundary lines.

Vollmer said a number of families in the Nedrose district have sought to annex their property to the Minot Public School District and Vollmer anticipates that more might do so in the future. But annexations are often opposed by the home school district which would lose property from its own tax base. There are also rules that parents must follow when they seek to annex their property to another district. Annexations must also be approved by the county and state reorganization boards.

No decisions were made on Monday.