Napa Pipe developers recently bought three tracts of land neighboring the original 154-acre Napa Pipe site and will set property aside for a new elementary school campus if local officials request it.

One possibility is a 19-acre parcel on the southern edge of the Napa Pipe property, which Napa Redevelopment Partners leader Keith Rogal referred to as a “study” or “reserve” area.

A specific purpose for the site has yet to be determined, he said, but the land could end up slated for a school, fairgrounds, church or other facility. Napa Pipe developers also recently acquired a 10-acre parcel north of the original Napa Pipe property and an option on eight other acres, also to the north, Rogal said.

Public hearings on Napa Pipe are scheduled in the next few weeks and a vote from the Napa County Board of Supervisors is expected next year. As a result, Rogal said, plans are far from definite, but talks with school district officials revealed that the 10-acre site “seemed most interesting for a school.”

Rogal said his vision of Napa Pipe includes making it a “walkable property” for residents who could enjoy close proximity to school, church and other services. Rogal said if the school district remains interested in putting a school on Napa Pipe land, developers “would work with them to make the land available either on the property or very nearby the property.”

Don Evans, Napa Valley Unified School District’s director of school planning and construction, said it’s too early to talk in detail about a possible school at Napa Pipe. But he acknowledged that the proposed 2,580-home development would bring many new students to the area.

“Any time you have a project of this size, there’s the real potential that at some grade level … a school may be necessary,” he said.

If Napa Pipe were built out as proposed, according to the draft environmental impact report released last week, the first homes would be finished in 2013 and the whole site built out by 2022.

Napa Pipe would bring about 1,105 new students to the school district, according to the report. Nearly 500 would be elementary school-aged children, nearly 270 are expected to be middle school students and the remaining 350 or so would be high school-aged, the report states.

In 2008, a NVUSD demographic report indicated a need for a new elementary school in the southern quadrant of Napa within about the next 10 years.

Evans noted “a possibility that there could be two elementary schools out there,” referring to a campus that might eventually be built north of Imola Avenue and east of Soscol Avenue and a potential school at Napa Pipe.

As with Canyon Oaks Elementary School in American Canyon, a new school partly paid for by a developer would cost the district less than building one from scratch. The school district could net approximately $3.2 million in developers’ fees “during build-out of the project,” according to a Napa Pipe report. The report states the district could nearly double that amount if the school district uses a different fee structure.

Thanks in large part to developers’ fees and state funding, NVUSD paid for just $1 million of the approximately $15.5 million Canyon Oaks Elementary School project in American Canyon. Standard Pacific, the developer of new homes near Canyon Oaks, paid for the rest.

As for a south Napa school, said Evans, “We would certainly explore all possibilities to avoid the district having to commit dollars we certainly don’t have in this economic time, nor would we be looking to ask voters to support construction for that.”

Yet projections and plans are only preliminary. NVUSD Superintendent John Glaser said with the Napa Pipe environmental report just released, the project not yet approved and the schools focusing on more pressing budget and planning matters, NVUSD is “nowhere near being into discussions” about the possibility of a new school at Napa Pipe.