Get ready to say “shalom” to the Shalom School.
The 50-year-old building, which houses the Sacramento area’s only Jewish day school, will soon be supplanted by a brand new structure.
The school breaks ground Oct. 2 on its new home, which will cost somewhere between $7 million and $9 million. The new structure is located near the Arden Fair Shopping Center, about a mile and a half from the current structure, which has housed Shalom School since 1978.
The new school is located on property owned by the Conservative Mosaic Law Congregation, which has offered Shalom School a 25-year lease for a buck a year.
Joan Gufinow, the school’s director, said Shalom’s current home is coming apart at the seams, and a move was necessary. She said the school hopes to occupy its new building by September 2007.
“We just invested in having our roofs patched, as we do every year. They need to be replaced. The rooms have limited electrical outlets in an age of technology. The windows are old and cloudy instead of being bright and cheery,” said Gufinow, whose school boasts 240 students from ages “six weeks to grade six.”
“You could do a lot of maintenance for $7-to-9 million. If we put it into this building, we could make substantial improvements. But this way, we get a state of the art building.”
The new building will have as many classrooms as the current site, and be about the same size at 50,000-square-feet. So far, the school has raised $6 million toward its capital campaign.
The current building is owned by the Sacramento-area federation, which is discussing what to do with it.