LAKEWOOD — “It’s my last big power move,” Kelly Allen laughed, as she joined her fellow Lakewood school board members Sept. 17 to vote unanimously in favor of using their bond to build a new Lakewood High School.

Allen was appointed to the Director District 2 position in 2009, and resigned from the board because she’ll be moving out of the district, due to a new job in Leavenworth. During her final board meeting, she made the motion to approve the new plans for LHS.

“Kelly gave us a perspective we desperately needed,” Lakewood Superintendent Michael Mack said. “We’re eternally grateful for her courage in speaking the truth.”

Board President Larry Bean expressed his appreciation to Allen for taking on so much work.

“She dove into it with abandon,” Bean said. “I’m glad she thought it was fun, because I wasn’t looking forward to doing it.”

Allen’s twins have already graduated from Lakewood and are attending Washington State University, so she looks forward to moving to Eastern Washington, even as she’ll miss her old hometown.

“I learned so much from this school district,” Allen said. “This is such a great board. We never leave a meeting mad, because we always stay until everything gets done.”

The board’s decision to apply the voters’ $66.8 million in bond money to a new school building, rather than renovating the existing LHS facility, yielded little controversy.

After Mack made his official recommendation in favor of the new plans, Bean praised the Sept. 10 public forum for providing an opportunity for community input, almost all of which favored the new plans.

“When our high school science teacher, Mr. Fellows, pointed out how they’d have to move chemicals into the portables, I hadn’t thought about that,” board member Greg Jensen said.

Mack noted that the district’s legal counsel had reviewed the resolution for the new plans, and added: “It’s very rare for the value analysis to come back with a suggested revision like this, so I applaud their courage.”

While the board’s decision met with no dissent Sept. 17, the process by which it arrived to that point was questioned by former district employee Dorothy Bolton.

“Why were these consultants hired to do a walk-through to review the plans after the bond passed?” Bolton asked. “Why not before? That’s putting the cart before the horse.”

Bolton described herself as a well-connected member of the community, but was nonetheless surprised by the proposed change in plans, which she only heard about through The Arlington Times.

“I’m not disagreeing that the old high school needed to be completely replaced,” Bolton said. “I remember that building, and it wasn’t that great to begin with. I’m just saying you need to be more forthright.”

Mack explained that the district had contacted other news outlets, as well as the families of its students, to invite the community to its public hearing. When Bolton pointed out that it’s not just voters with children in the district who pay taxes toward the district, Mack cited the cost of mass-mailing the district’s voters.

“We had short amount of time to get this information out there, especially with dirt work targeted to begin in the early fall,” Mack said. “It wasn’t our intent to be secretive at all about this decision, and voters can rest assured that they won’t be spending any more money than they would otherwise. The new plans have the same price.”