The First Family Church held its last service in Sept. 2011. The foreclosed building has stood vacant, but it won’t be empty for long. In early April 2012, the Blue Valley school district purchased the property for use as a center for early-childhood education and professional development.
When the church was foreclosed on in Sept. 2011, Blue Valley deputy superintendent, Dr. Al Hanna, saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand the school district. The First Family building is large, surrounded by 51 acres of land, and is conveniently located on 143rd St. near the center of the district. Hanna represented the Blue Valley district in the decision-making process and negotiations with the Regions Bank.
“The church had its last service the Sunday after Labor Day, and closed soon after,” Hanna said. “As soon as it was foreclosed and available, we started doing research into buying the property.”
The idea of buying the former church was brought up at the most recent bond campaign meeting in Jan. 2012. During this event, district officials met to determine the district’s financial needs for the future and discussed the campaign for the bond election that would provide these funds. The purchase of the First Family Church and its property was approved at a school board meeting near the end of Mar. 2012.
The property itself cost $9 million, which was taken from the funds in the $271 million bond package passed in January. With additional renovations the building will be worth an estimated $19 million. Construction and renovations on the building will begin in Aug. 2012, and it is expected to open in the fall of 2014.
The First Family complex has a 125,000 square-foot interior, some of which was devoted to worship space. This space will likely be renovated and used for some sort of professional development or teacher training. There are also many Sunday-school classrooms that will be adapted into larger rooms for the proposed early-childhood center.
This center will be a preschool for special-needs children aged three to five, many of whom already have Individual Education Plans (IEPs) and will later attend an elementary school within the Blue Valley district.
“This will be a center where we’ll bring in a number of students with special needs,” Hanna said. “Currently our special needs teachers are spread out all over the district. We think we can provide better services by centralizing things.”
The building is expected to contain 16 classrooms, each of which will have 10-12 students. Half of the children will have IEPs, and the others will serve as “peer models” to help with education and social skills. The peer models’ parents give consent for them to attend preschool at the center, and these children will also benefit from the educational setting.
The First Family Church property will be the first such center to open in the district, and it should provide a valuable resource for special-education students and their parents. The center will employ many teachers and para-professionals from across the district.
“We actually did a pilot project a few years ago,” Blue Valley deputy superintendent Dr. Sue Dole said. “We put eight early-childhood classrooms at Timber Creek Elementary when it was built. We brought a whole series of classrooms together to see how that would work, and it worked so well that we’re going to do it on a bigger scale.”
The purchase of the First Family church has given Dole and others in the district an opportunity to create a centralized location for early-childhood education.
“It’s not the building that’s important, but the fact that it sits on 51 acres of land right in the middle of the district,” Dole said. “We’re not going to add any new buildings for now, but in ten or fifteen years that land will be useful. This purchase is an investment in the district’s f