FARGO (KFGO/KVRR) — The Fargo School Board unanimously approved moving forward with building a new school on the Horace Mann Elementary School site.
“I think this will improve educational outcomes, the flow of a new building,” board member Nikki Gullickson says. “We’ve seen the data on how that impacts grading and scoring.”
The project is estimated to cost $45 million with timelines for the project to be developed by December.
During construction, students will be placed at Washington, Roosevelt, or Madison for the 2026-2027 and 2027-2028 school years.
“Two years ago, when we started this conversation, I think there was a lot of trepidation when it came to closing certain schools, building new schools, moving things around,” board President Katie Christensen Mineer says. “But after two years of study, as you can see from our unanimous board decision, we feel like this is the right place to start and we feel as a board we are making the right decision for our district, for our students, for our teachers, and for our community.”
Horace Mann and Roosevelt previously held kindergarten through fifth grades, but in 2008, K-2 students began going to Horace Mann, and Roosevelt focused on grades 3-5. Madison continued to teach grades K through 5.
“The Horace Mann-Roosevelt decision was really based on the quality of those buildings,” Christensen Mineer says. “There’s a high level of deferred maintenance and those buildings are actually really lacking a lot of the more modern resources that we want our students to have.”
According to Fargo Public Schools, the new school will have the capacity to serve approximately 444 students in grades K–5 and consolidate the current Horace Mann–Roosevelt and Madison elementary school attendance areas into one centrally located facility on the Horace Mann site. Once completed, the Roosevelt and Madison school buildings will be closed.
The new school is expected to open in Fall 2028.
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