Some Pathfinder K-8 School parents are speaking out against a proposal to move their alternative program to the Louisa Boren interim site, a building they say is no better than their current dilapidated facility.

Last Friday, Seattle Schools Superintendent Raj Manhas agreed with the district's community advisory committee on school closures and consolidations that the Pathfinder program would be better suited leaving the former Genesee Hill School and moving into the larger Boren School building on Delridge Way.

In its final recommendations to Manhas the committee said, "Boren is a more spacious facility and would allow for growth of the program as well as potential co-location of compatible programs." But Pathfinder Parent Teacher Association co-president Lynette Martin said that is exactly what the school staff and parent community does not want.

The school's Facility Advocacy Group surveyed Pathfinder staff and parents and found a collective agreement that the school should stay small and separate from other programs. A move to Boren would be contrary to those goals, said Martin.

"As a community we agree that we don't support this proposal in any way, shape or form," said Martin. "This would just move us from a small crummy building into a huge crummy building."

Martin said the Parent Teacher Association felt assured that the committee and the Seattle School Board understood their goals.

"This came as a slap in the face and goes against all of our needs," said Pathfinder parent Heather de Vrieze. "(Boren) is as old and rundown as our current building. There were no bad intentions - but I think (the committee) was looking for easy answers."

A K-8 alternative school with a Native American focus, Pathfinder has the largest number of portables of any program in the district, which does not create an unified K-8 environment, said Manhas.

The school's alternative teaching model includes multi-age classrooms and eight-week expeditionary learning programs that integrate core subjects. But for it to stay successful, the program requires detailed co-teaching that should be done within a small learning community, said Martin.

Sharing a building with other programs, as suggested by the advisory committee, would be "incredibly awkward no matter how wonderful the other program is," said de Vrieze, who's son is a third-grader at Pathfinder.

"We have concerns about not knowing who is coming into our school," said Martin. "It would change the dynamics for sure."

There are 387 students at Pathfinder, including its middle school program that is housed in 10 portables on the campus. The school hopes to grow by no more than 30 additional students, said Martin.

But according to the superintendent's recommendations, the district welcomes the chance to grow the program in a larger facility and establish a Native American-focused building.

Boren is nearly four times larger than Genesee Hill. It has a slightly better educational adequacy score, which measures the school's ability to house a student body, and Boren's backlog of maintenance and repairs is about $5 million more than Genesee Hill's.

Neither building is fit for educational programs, according to district building condition documents. Facility assessments done in 2005 said Boren is "of low-end construction with generally low ceilings, dark interior corridors... and warrants complete upgrade of systems and finishes if it were to be used for a middle school again."

Martin said she doesn't have faith that the district could bring the building up to standards by the 2007-08 school year, which is when the closures are scheduled.

The district rates Genesee as too small and "very poorly arranged"... "and the use of relatively remote portables to extend facility capacity makes the campus seem disjointed and overtaxes specialty spaces never designed to hold the larger student body."

Martin said Pathfinder does need a larger facility to integrate its classrooms and adequately serve its middle school, but if Boren is the only offer from the district they would rather stay where they are.

"As a community we are just going to really resist this unless the district can show us how the move would benefit our community," said Martin.

As the recommendations stand now, Pathfinder supports the two previous proposals; last year's recommendation to move to Cooper Elementary School and the advisory committee's preliminary recommendation to move Pathfinder to High Point. Both Cooper and High Point students would have been dispersed to undetermined neighboring schools.

"We need something that will honor our community," said Martin, "not a broken band-aid."