The Chippewa Falls School District could be asking for help from the community in the form of a referendum in the next couple of years.

Tuesday night the school board discussed ways to solve it's space crunch, and to set up a timeline for further planning.

Currently there are many options on the table, from portable classrooms to building a new high school. But Superintendent Dr. Tom Hughes is focusing on a long term plan that will last for the next 15-20 years.

Bobbie Baker at Halmstad Elementary says a lot of her time each year is focused not on teaching her third graders new information, but backing up and re-teaching what they didn't learn well enough in their overcrowded first and second grade classrooms. “I have to make adaptions and I have to adjust to their level, so I may have to back up and do some interventions to get them up to grade level,” she says.

Something Superintendent Dr. Tom Hughes has been spending a lot of time on. But he says it’s a complicated issue, one that will take many board meetings to fix. “We wouldn't want to do something that made pretty good sense five years out, but really was a bad idea, 15- 20 years out,“ he says.

Taking it slowly and measuring his options, “We want things that are cost effective, long lasting and aren't things that look like solutions this year, but go geez, 5 years from now,“ Hughes says.

Which means likely, portable classrooms at about $100,000 each are out, and redistricting is in. But for right now all options, including building a new high school, remain on the table

Dr. Hughes says one thing that could serve as a good short term solution is adding on individual classrooms onto overcrowded schools like Jim Falls Elementary.

Superintendent Hughes says the district will likely have to ask the public for help in paying for ways to solve the space crunch. He says this could come within the next few years.