These Pierce Co. schools have a toilet shortage. Is ‘Port-a-potty city’ coming?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Orting School District seeks $137M bond to rebuild elementary and expand CTE.
- Orting schools operate beyond capacity with dozens of portables and limited bathrooms.
- This is the fifth time the district has put the bond before voters.
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East Pierce County elections
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When Orting High School principal Matt Carlson visits his school’s cafeteria, the lunch lines wrap around the room.
Many students wait for their food for 20 minutes of a 30-minute lunch break. When they do get their food, dozens of them will find that there aren’t enough seats for them.
“We have 100 kids that eat lunch out of our cafeteria – in the hallway, or in picnic tables out front,” Carlson told The News Tribune. “We have kids sitting on ramps and stairs eating lunch.”
Most of Orting High School was built in the 1980s, with some additions in the early 2000s. Built for 350 students, the population is now at almost 900 – more than double capacity.
Next door is Orting Elementary School. Connie Halvorson-Tran, the principal of Orting Elementary, told The News Tribune that the school is “bursting at the seams.”
“Right now, over half of Orting Elementary’s students learn in portable classrooms,” Halvorson-Tran wrote in an email to The News Tribune. “... A new elementary school would bring all students together under one roof — where every child can feel a true sense of belonging and safety.”
On Nov. 4, voters will decide whether to approve Orting School District’s $137 million bond.
The bond would rebuild Orting Elementary – which had 572 students during the 2024-2025 school year – from a building designed to house 250 students to one with a 600-student capacity. The new elementary school would sit on 65 acres of land the district owns adjacent to Orting High School, allowing the high school to take over the rest of the 40-acre property the schools currently share.
The bond would also allow the high school to gain 200 seats in a new Career and Technical Education (CTE) wing.
“The CTE programs that would be constructed would revolve around a [Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics] lab, a culinary commercial kitchen, and a health sciences lab in addition to regular science lab space for our biotechnology, biology classes, chemistry classes,” Carlson told The News Tribune.
This marks the fifth time the district has put a bond package before voters since 2023. The district spans 45 miles across Orting and areas near Puyallup, Graham, and Bonney Lake, including part of the master-planned Sunrise Community in South Hill.
Superintendent Ed Hatzenbeler told The News Tribune this is the first time the bond package will just include the new elementary school and new CTE space for the high school. Brittany Piger, spokesperson for the district, told The News Tribune the district estimates that both the new elementary school and the new space for the high school would be completed in the fall of 2029.
“When we didn’t pass in November 2024, we commissioned a public group, anyone that wanted to join the bond task force to help us revise or look at the package,” Hatzenbeler said. “And then they basically made revisions that reduced the amount in this bond.”
It’s not enough if the “yes” votes outweigh the “no” votes. In order to pass, the bond – like all other bond measures in Washington state – needs to meet two requirements:
- A 60% supermajority of “yes” votes.
- An overall turnout equivalent to 40% of the last general election – a tall ask after record voter turnout in the 2024 presidential cycle. Kyle Haugh, the elections supervisor for the Pierce County Elections Office, told The News Tribune the bond needs 4,242 votes in order to meet that turnout threshold.
Laura Lovey Fischer, head of the “Yes” Committee, worked in the Orting School District for 34 years as a bus driver, school board director and secretary. She retired last year.
“The staff here is probably the best, top-notch staff I’ve seen, and I’ve worked in the Orting School District for 34 years ... and they’re doing a great job,” Lovey Fischer said. “But to work in these kinds of conditions is very difficult.”
There isn’t a “No” Committee listed in the Pierce County voter’s guide for this measure.
‘It’s like if you put 12 people in a two-bedroom, one-bath.’
At Orting High School, there are currently 22 portables compared to 15 classrooms in the building.
“Some might say, ‘Portables are fine, what’s the problem?’” Hatzenbeler said. “But when you exceed your built capacity, you don’t have enough space in your cafeteria to feed your children and make sure they have adequate seat time. You don’t have space for mental health and social support like counseling and intervention. You run out of restroom space.”
There are three bathrooms in the building, Hatzenbeler said, and three port-a-potties. Both schools are also struggling with having enough parking.
“It’s like if you put 12 people in a house that’s two-bedroom, one-bath,” Hatzenbeler said. “It’s just, it’s hard.”
Halvorson-Tran said the lunch and bathroom lines are brutal at the elementary school as well.
“Our cafeteria is too small to serve our growing population efficiently,” Halvorson-Tran wrote in an email to The News Tribune. “The line for the bathroom can take the majority of the lunch block because we simply don’t have enough restrooms for the number of kids we serve. We have two toilets for around 8 classrooms during the lunch period.”
Halvorson-Tran also said the overcrowding has caused students and staff to repurpose rooms that normally wouldn’t be used for instruction.
“Every inch of our building is used — storage closets turned into small group spaces for reading intervention, shared offices converted into space for mental health services, multiple special education service providers in single rooms and learning spilling into outside the building when noise from overcrowded spaces becomes too much,” Halvorson-Tran wrote in an email to The News Tribune.
Portables isolate students from their community and from resources they need, Hatzenbeler said, such as interventionists, occupational therapists or physical therapists. On top of that, they’re exposed to the elements.
“Our weather in the rain and the hot and the cold, it doesn’t matter. You’re out in it every day,” Hatzenbeler said.
There are also safety concerns. Hatzenbeler brought up the example of an active shooter situation.
“You’re out in the open, and oftentimes things like alarms, lockdown systems, keyless controls, PA systems – they don’t speak and work well attached to your portable facilities,” Hatzenbeler said. “So, you have the added challenge of communication in any type of emergency.”
Hatzenbeler said they are expecting 4,700 more homes in the district within the next decade. According to the district’s website, the Daybreak, Sunrise, Uplands and Tehaleh developments “are expected to add 542 multi-family homes and 4,117 single-family homes from now through 2035.” Piger told The News Tribune in an email the district currently has about 2,890 students and is expecting the population to be about 5,019 in 2035.
Carlson said if the overcrowding isn’t addressed, future growth will impact gym classes as well.
“We’re right in that sweet spot now where our master schedule works, but add 200, 300 students? I don’t know how we’re going to do it,” Carlson said.
If the bond passes, Carlson said they would take over the current elementary school after the new elementary school is built, meaning the high school would have two cafeterias and two gyms.
‘The ‘have-nots’ in Pierce County’
One of the biggest tragedies to come from overcrowding, Carlson said, is not having the space to offer students CTE opportunities like welding, culinary programs and agricultural science. The school has a partnership with the Pierce County Skills Center, but the demand for those programs outweighs the spots the center can offer.
“Our kids in this community have the ‘have-nots’ in Pierce County,” Carlson said. “If you go to every high school in every school district in the region – White River, Puyallup, Sumner/Bonney Lake – their kids have access to career and technical educational programs that provide them job training in the trades, in the aerospace industry, in the service industry that is commensurate with the world of work. And we currently cannot do that.”
Carlson noted that many competitive jobs are in the trades.
“Can they get training on the job when they get there? Yeah, but they’re not immediately competitive when they leave us,” Carlson said. “Kids need access to these programs, desperately. So what happens if we don’t pass it? We continue to fall further behind.”
How much will this cost?
Taxpayers already pay the district $1.98 per $1,000 assessed property value every year in levies, Hatzenbeler said. This bond would cost about $1.27 per $1,000, meaning taxpayers would pay $3.25 per $1,000 to the district each year.
Zillow says the average home in Orting costs roughly $560,000. That homeowner would pay the district about $1,820 in property taxes each year if the bond passes compared to $1,109 if it fails – a $711 increase.
“People get confused. It’s like, ‘I already paid a tax, What am I doing?’” Hatzenbeler said. “Levies – those are usually renewed every two to four years – pay for programs that aren’t funded by the state: extracurriculars, performing arts, transportation that is underfunded, you name it.”
Bonds, Hatzenbeler said, have to do with buildings, and are separate from the existing $1.98 levy.
There would be no increase in 2026, Hatzenbeler said. The increase would take effect in 2027.
According to the district’s website, the state would provide $11.1 million in state match funds if the bond passes, to help pay for the projects.
Past bond measures put before the voters were $150 million, but Hatzenbeler said they reduced the cost to $137 million by cutting HVAC improvements, safety and security measures for the other schools, and a gym and cafeteria expansion at Ptarmigan Ridge Elementary School.
Carlson said he gets lots of questions about using impact fees, which Pierce County puts on new developments to fund the improvements to the schools.
“We get $3,300 per new home in Pierce County, compared to $23,000 in King County. Just at those rates, just this $37 million bond package we’re proposing … we would need to build 32,000 new homes,” Carlson said. “The math doesn’t pan out, we can’t use impact fees. We need a bond to do this.”
Lovey Fischer said the “Yes” committee is trying to sway voters who may be hesitant to approve the bond because of the cost.
“I hear people say, ‘I’m tired of giving money and taxes to the government,’” Fischer said. “The school district is not the government, it’s an entity of its own ... So, it’s not like the government where the taxes go and they’re dispersed, when you vote ‘yes’ on a bond or a levy, those dollars go straight to your school district and they stay in your community.”
What happens if the bond fails again?
Lovey Fischer said the “yes” committee is working as hard as they can to get the bond passed.
“We drilled down to the most important parts that we needed right now in order to keep moving forward,” Lovey Fischer said. “I think that there’s a lot of people’s hands in this and there’s a lot of people helping to move this forward because our community cares about kids.”
Carlson said if the bond fails, the district will have to make drastic decisions in the future that will harm students and taxpayers.
“I’ll be putting teachers on carts,” Carlson said. “Teachers on a cart, moving from classroom to classroom, not having a set classroom, to accommodate.”
Lunch period would increase from two lunches to three per day, Carlson said, eating into learning time. He would also have to tackle the bathroom situation, calling his solution “port-a-potty city.”
“The health department would probably require me to have some kind of pump situation for handwashing, and I would have to spend taxpayer dollars on that,” Carlson said. “I would continue to lose parking spaces for students, which would increase overflow of parking into the city and also for students. And also, potentially, it would cost taxpayers money in terms of trying to find parking off campus where we lease something.”
Halvorson-Tran said the elementary school would have to keep increasing its portables.
“Our community is growing — and that’s a good thing,” Halvorson-Tran wrote in an email to The News Tribune. “But without a new elementary school, we’ll eventually reach a point where there just isn’t any room to grow safely.”
Hatzenbeler said the district has not made an exact plan for what to do if the bond fails, but steps could become more drastic as time goes on.
“For instance, students may start the day at 6:30 in the morning and some may start their day at 2:00 in the afternoon and go late at night. Bethel and Puyallup have both done those,” Hatzenbeler said. “You can look at year-round options where you’re two weeks on, two weeks off – something to maximize the space in a non-traditional way. You can fill your class sizes up full.”
One of the worst things that could happen, Hatzenbeler said, is shutting down the elementary school and sending the students to Ptarmigan Ridge Elementary School.
“We may have to close Orting Elementary, ship all of those students to the other and try to run an elementary school of 1,200 students so high school students have room,” Hatzenbeler said. “There’s no good solution.”
This story was originally published October 17, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
