Despite objections, Discovery, Odyssey to share one campus

There are still a few kinks to work out and likely a few worried students to convince, but the Camas School District’s plan to merge its project-based learning middle and high schools into one building seems to have found a path forward that quells most, if not all, of the concerns raised earlier this year when the district first announced the creation of its first 6-12 school.

“Things have calmed down quite a bit,” said Daniel Huld, the school’s principal. “But I know this is a big change for our campus.”

Huld has spent the past few months fielding questions about the merger, listening to concerned students and staff, and working with consultants to come up with a diverse range of ages — from 11-year-old sixth-graders to 18-year-old seniors — under one roof.

Huld has tried to reassure all of his students and their families, pointing out that Odyssey Middle School students were already coming into the adjacent Discovery High School building for lunch, fitness, art and other classes, so the transition won’t be entirely new. And Huld plans to start a mentorship program that will pair older high school students with incoming middle-schoolers to “foster kindness and community.”

Next year, Huld will launch parent and student advisory groups to, as he told Camas school board members on May 12, “monitor how the building use is working and start the work of building a cohesive 6-12 project-based learning school in one building.”

As for the fears about overcrowding, Huld said he’s not worried about running out of space any time soon.

“We’ll have 530 students next year, but this building has space for 600, so there is still room to grow and expand,” he said.

When the district announced the merger in February, Communications Director Doreen McKerchers said the move was a cost-savings measure for the cash-strapped school district, which has had to lay off more than 50 staff members to make up for an expected $13 million budget shortfall in 2025-26.

News of the school merger attracted a fair amount of pushback from students and their families earlier this year.

Dozens of Odyssey students organized a walkout in February and said they worried sharing a building might stifle the types of collaborative, hands-on projects they’d become accustomed to inside the spacious middle school building.

Huld said his team listened to these concerns and tried to reconfigure the Discovery building to provide similar learning opportunities.

The new school will offer four private rooms for students seeking a quiet space, two open commons areas — one for Odyssey students and one for Discovery students — classrooms divided by age on the school’s second floor; and several shared rooms, including music, health, art and Spanish language classrooms, a gymnasium, media and counseling centers and the school’s state-of-the-art makerspace.

The principal credited his teachers and other staff for their professional demeanor during such a tumultuous time.

“We still have a lot to get done,” Huld said. “But the staff here has been amazing and very professional.”

A decade of change

If there’s one thing students at the project-based learning campus understand, it’s how to work together.

A decade ago, when district leaders first pitched Camas voters on the idea of creating a such a campus, they emphasized collaboration over individual work assignments and predicted students would soon be “engaged, inspired and invested in learning together.”

The combined 6-12 school will test the boundaries of that theory, but Discovery High career specialist Ed Neumann said he has been talking to students and parents and has high hopes.

“I’m optimistic,” Neumann said. “I think it’s going to be pretty cool.”

And, of course, the campus itself has had to evolve over the past decade. In the span of nine years, the tree-ringed site, located about a mile west of 192nd Avenue off Northwest Pacific Rim Boulevard, has transformed from a global electronic manufacturing hub to a campus serving over 500 middle and high school students — including about 50 students who live outside the Camas School District in Vancouver, Hockinson, Washougal and other parts of Clark County.

The Camas School District purchased the 31-acre site and 55,000-square-foot office building from Sharp Laboratories of America for $12.5 million in 2016 and used money from a $120 million voter-approved facilities bond.

The district transformed the office building into the current Odyssey Middle School, which opened to students in the fall of 2016. Construction on the adjacent, $45 million Discovery High School was completed in 2018, just in time for the 2018-19 school year.

Discovery started with just a freshman class and was supposed to grow organically as those students became sophomores, juniors and seniors to 600-student capacity. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, hampered the school’s growth trajectory. The high school now has around 200 students in grades nine through 12, while Odyssey has continued to grow and has 320 students in grades six through eight enrolled signed up for the 2025-26 school year.

Combining the two schools will help fill the Discovery building and will free up the former Sharp office building, giving the school district another possible revenue source.

Instead of allowing the space to stand empty until the district might need it again, Camas School District Superintendent John Anzalone said, he and his team are investigating the possibility of leasing the former office building to a business or nonprofit that would complement the PBL campus’ educational mission.

“We know we’ll never be able to buy a building at that cost again so the logical thing would be a short-term lease,” Anzalone said.

Huld said new students and families will be able to tour the combined Discovery-Odyssey school this summer, with open houses planned for incoming sixth-graders on Aug. 21 and for incoming freshmen on Aug. 22.