Crescent Harbor Elementary says farewell before demolition, new school nears completion

Crescent Harbor Elementary closed one chapter and opened another at a farewell ceremony Wednesday evening, when current and former students, teachers, parents and district officials gathered one last time inside the Oak Harbor school before demolition starts in July. The celebration honored a building that opened in 1961, but it also pointed to the larger shift now taking shape just outside: a new school is nearly finished and is scheduled to open in October.

The old building is coming down because Oak Harbor Public Schools is replacing it with a new Crescent Harbor Elementary designed for 500 kindergarten-through-fourth-grade students. The district said the project is being built by Tiger Construction and is part of a rare funding arrangement that covers the cost through state and federal grants rather than a traditional local bond. In August 2024, the U.S. Department of Defense announced a $70,631,558 federal award for Crescent Harbor as part of an $84,300,054 project, and the district said it secured about $27.5 million in state funding in 2023 to match the federal share.

Oak Harbor Public Schools says Crescent Harbor Elementary and Hand-in-Hand/HomeConnection are the only schools in the district eligible for these military-installation grants because they sit on Naval Air Station Whidbey Island property. The district says the two replacement projects together total more than $130 million in state and federal grants, with about $1.4 million coming from local district funds. Bayley Construction is building the Hand-in-Hand/HomeConnection project, and district leaders have said the arrangement allows local taxpayers to avoid the cost of a conventional bond measure.

Principal Bill Weinsheimer used the ceremony to look back even further, tracing the school’s roots to a Crescent Harbor school that operated on or near the site from the late 1800s to 1924 or 1925. District history materials place it among North Whidbey’s original pioneer schools, giving the farewell a sense of continuity that stretched from the 1890s to the present rebuild. The new building is expected to replace crowded spaces and portables with more modern learning areas, including classroom pods.

The project also sits inside a larger military-community investment on North Whidbey. The district said federal noise-insulation grants were approved for Olympic View Elementary, Hillcrest Elementary and Oak Harbor Elementary in September 2025, while North Whidbey Middle School received similar funding the previous school year. The U.S. Department of Defense said those awards support recruitment and retention at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island and strengthen installation-community partnerships. Capt. Nathan Gammache attended the farewell ceremony, underscoring how tightly the school’s next chapter is tied to the base, the neighborhood and the future of Oak Harbor’s public schools.