ParaSport Spokane finds new home at former Mountain View Middle School

ParaSport Spokane has a new home: the former Mountain View Middle School in Newman Lake.

The group’s seven-year lease at Valley Christian School ended this fall. After a search that pressed close to the organization’s lease deadline, ParaSport began programs in late September at its new site, 6011 N. Chase Road. That school closed in 2011 amid East Valley School District’s lower enrollment and budget issues.

Overseeing ParaSports Spokane since 2013, director Teresa Skinner said Mountain View has the space to train and store equipment for its adaptive athletics. The nonprofit has 200 youth and adults with physical disabilities enrolled in multiple programs.

“We’ve started at Mountain View with our strength and conditioning, wheelchair basketball, wheelchair fencing and our Futures Program, which is for kids 5 and under,” Skinner said. “Futures is an activity-based program for 45 minutes. The kids rotate from different stations and work on movement, social skills, and all kinds of fun stuff.”

Spokane County previously leased Mountain View for its former Sheriff’s Office Training Center. In fall 2023, that moved to the new Spokane County Sheriff’s Office Regional Law Enforcement Training Center in Airway Heights. The county and Fairchild Air Force Base partnered to build the facility to train both airmen and deputies.

Unlike Valley Christian, Mountain View lacks an outdoor track, but Skinner said the group’s track and field athletes have moved inside to train during the colder months. She hopes that later they can schedule use of East Valley High School’s running track when it’s available.

“There is no track at all at Mountain View, which is kind of a bummer, but it meets every other requirement that we needed,” she said. “In addition to that, they (EVSD leaders) really want us here and want to partner with us. That feels so amazing.”

High school students can job-shadow coaches, such as herself, added Skinner, an occupational therapist.

ParaSport can offer disability education and awareness sessions within the district.

ParaSport Spokane has more than 20 coaches who volunteer, including for track and field, strength and conditioning, wheelchair basketball, swimming, parafencing and sled hockey.

EVSD Superintendent Brian Talbott said district leaders wanted to back ParaSport’s mission, and East Valley students with disabilities are now closer to join its sports programs.

“We had the space and they had the need,” Talbott said. “It’s an amazingly wonderful cause, so we entered into an agreement with them, pretty much with the details to come later.”

Talbott said Mountain View sat mostly vacant after the sheriff’s office left, but deputies and Homeland Security officers still will occasionally use the site for safety and response training, when ParaSport programs aren’t active.

He said that ParaSport leaders toured the school earlier this year, while looking at other sites, but they initially had concerns about the distance to Mountain View and lack of a track. However, the group wasn’t able to find another arrangement.

In August, just before athletes and coaches from ParaSport Spokane were about to go to Paris for the Paralympics, Talbott heard from development director David Greig.

“David said, ‘We don’t know exactly what it could look like, but we need to get out of the building we’re in before we go to Paris,’ because their lease option was up, so we just made it happen,” Talbott added. “There’s legalese and those kinds of things we have to take care of, but in the interim, while they were getting ready to head off and take care of their athletes, we wanted to make it painless.

“Just hearing their story, I literally get teared up when I think about how I asked David and Teresa, ‘Is this your guys’ full-time job?’ Come to find out, this is completely voluntary. It’s really difficult not to get on their team. There’s a huge need, and not a lot of options out there, for this kind of program.”

This fall also worked for ParaSport’s arrival, he said, after recent repairs from an August 2022 hailstorm that damaged the roof and was followed by water damage, “so we had a new roof put on; there was some interior work done as mitigation to the water.”

The school has two gyms, but the water badly damaged the floor of the larger gymnasium, he said.

“The water damage was so bad that we tore the floor out, which gave us a big, open concrete floor. In the grand scheme, we opted not to put a wood floor back over it because there may be a need for us to utilize that space in the future for trades programs.”

Talbott said the district also has a new agreement with Liberty Lake Spokane Valley Little League, which is using its own “sweat equity” and funding to rebuild four baseball fields at the middle school.

Meanwhile, ParaSport has a place, he said.

“It saddens me they don’t have their own facility,” Talbott said. “As their need grows, perhaps there could be grants to afford a home base for them, but we’re happy to be their home base in the interim.