ZED breaks ground on new building

It was a long time coming but the Zumbro Education District (ZED) officially broke ground for its new building on Highway 57 in Kasson last week. The new building will be next to to the Catholic Church with the parking lot adjacent to Kasson-Mantorville High School.

ZED Executive director Patrick Gordon, members of the ZED board and students manned the shovels in the ceremonial groundbreaking. Construction work has actually been ongoing at the site for several weeks.
When the building opens in the fall of 2022, Gordon told those in attendance, it will mark the first time in its history that ZED will have all of its operations in one building. The district currently owns the South Campus building and leases space from the Byron School District. ZED needs to vacate the leased space at the end of the 2021- 22 school year because

Byron needs the space to accommodate its increasing enrollment.
“The building has been 30 years in the making,” Gordon said. The process of securing the new building, he added, has not been without its ups and downs since it began in 2019. 

ZED is a cooperative of seven school districts providing services to approximately 9,500 students. The district’s 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 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.
Discussions and planning for the new building began in 2019.
Currently, the ZED member schools include Blooming Prairie, Byron, Hayfield, Kasson-Mantorville, Pine Island, Stewart- ville, and Triton.
The Pine Island district has declined to participate in the building of the new facility and will be exiting ZED at the end  of the 2021-22 school year, Gordon said earlier. 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 earlier this year. 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 current ZED South Campus is a special education school for students kindergarten through  12th grade. These stu- dents, he said, are referred to ZED by their home school district with behavioral 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 moves 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.