The Woodland Park Planning Commission unanimously approved adding a school use to the Gold Hill Square South Planned Unit Development at its July 22 meeting.

The commission has the final say on PUD amendments; these cases do not move on to council. However, Woodland Park City Council had a small part in the process of bringing the academy to the square. Council eliminated the distance restriction between schools and businesses with liquor licenses.

Merit Academy plans to use the former Woodland Hardware building as a school. The contract school plans to set up 10 classrooms, nine of which will have moveable walls; a gym; offices; cafeteria; warming kitchen; and extra restrooms. They will make no changes to the building’s exterior.

While the school officials were waiting for the PUD amendment, ECHO Architecture started the building-permit process. The school year starts Aug. 23, and the school has already signed up 190 students from 150 families, so speed is of the essence.

City Planner Lor Pellegrino said this request meets all the applicable criteria the planning staff uses to approve adding a use to a PUD.

Gwynne Dawdy-pekron, who in May resigned as a Woodland Park School District RE-2 school board director, spoke as a representative of the Merit Academy School Board. Dawdy-pekron, who is Merit Academy’s director of development and serves as chief action officer to the school’s board, said the school includes kindergarten through eighth-grade students.

“We won’t add grades nine through 12 until we’re in our own building, maybe in three years,” she said.

The Merit Academy school day will start at 7:50 a.m., when most of the businesses in the square aren’t open. This should make student drop-off less congested, Dawdy-pekron said. “We’ll also encourage parents to carpool, and some of our students live close enough to walk,” she added.

Class start times will be staggered, allowing drop-off and pick-up times to be stretched out. Student pick-up will start at 3 p.m.

Commission Chairman Jon Devaux said at 3 p.m. the shopping center will not be as busy as it will be an hour or two later, which should also make pick-up safer.

Bill Page, who owns Gold Hill Square South, has already received a PUD amendment that will allow the same building to be converted into a Best Western Hotel. He said he would seek an extension to keep the hotel project on the table when the academy moves out and as the lodging market improves.

He added that parking shouldn’t be a big problem because most of the Square’s customers don’t stay long.

Commissioner Ellen Carrick asked about the relationship between the academy and the RE-2 school district.

“We’re neighborly,” Pekron said. “We are a public, Boces-contract school.”

This means the school is contracted through a Board of Cooperative Educational Services, in this case, the ER (Education Revisited) BOCES. The academy sought approval to create a charter-school from the RE-2 School District but was turned down in January.

Before giving its full approval to the PUD amendment, the commission added a condition defining “school” as “K12” so that it will not include other kinds of schools, such as a college or trade school.

Before the meeting, the commission began the first of at least four planned work sessions to go over the first draft of the Envision Woodland Park 2030 comprehensive plan update.

On this night, they considered the chapters on Economic Development and Tourism, Sustainability and Parks, Trails and Open Space. Members of the subcommittees that developed the chapters spoke about the thoughts behind the objectives and action items that appear in each chapter.

City Manager Michael Lawson fielded questions about economic development. Don Dezellum, who chaired the other two subcommittees, fielded questions on these two chapters with help from Jeff Webb and Cindy Keating, Parks and Recreation Director.

The commissioners went over the chapters page by page, making suggestions on language, looking for typographical errors and pointing out omissions or redundancies.

There are no cases for the planning commission’s next two regular meetings. The commissioners will use these meeting nights to continue working on the comprehensive plan.