Albany County district moves to demolish old Slade Elementary School

Crews had started tearing down Old Slade Elementary by March 10, 2025, after Albany County School District 1 approved a $32,000 bid to demolish the building at 1275 North 11th Street in Laramie. The work ended the old school’s life as a standing landmark and shifted attention to what the district and city would do with a prominent parcel that had already absorbed years of public investment.

A Wyoming legislative facility summary dated Oct. 5, 2022 described the replacement school as a 63,096-square-foot, one-story building designed for 448 students. The same summary said the old Slade had 303 students as of Oct. 1, 2021, and noted that $21,440,430 had been appropriated between the 2014 and 2020 legislative sessions for planning, design and capital construction tied to the project. That spending left Albany County with a newer Slade campus and an older building that no longer needed to remain in the district’s footprint.

The fate of the grounds became a separate neighborhood issue. Community partners had hoped to turn the abandoned school grounds into homes for teachers, hospital staff and other working professionals, and Assistant City Manager Todd Feezer was among those backing the idea. Later, the school board voted 7-2 to sell the abandoned school grounds to housing advocates, showing that the property was being treated not just as a demolition site but as a potential answer to Laramie’s workforce-housing shortage.

A May 15, 2026 Wyoming Public Media item said Laramie would purchase local school grounds for workforce housing, showing that the conversation around Old Slade moved beyond removing the structure and into reuse of the land itself. For taxpayers and nearby residents, the key questions were no longer whether the old building would come down, but how much the work would cost, how the district would pay for it, and whether clearing the site would create more value than leaving a vacant school building in place.