OGDEN — The Ogden School District plans to build a new multimillion-dollar facility to warehouse food used to prepare meals for students.

The new two-story, 15,000-square-foot building, costing an estimated $7 million, would also house the MarketStar Student Resource Center, which provides food, clothing, school supplies and more to students in need. The resource center, inaugurated last August, is now located adjacent to James Madison Elementary.

Money for the new building, coming as the district finishes the last of two new elementary schools funded with the help of an $87 million bond, will come from the district’s capital outlay budget, according to Jer Bates, the Ogden schools spokesperson. School officials, he said, gave the green light for plans to proceed on the Child Nutrition Facility, as it’s called, at a meeting last month.

“The facility will be built in the space that was formerly occupied by storage sheds at the west side of the parking lot next to the Spence Eccles Ogden Community Sports Complex,” Bates said. That’s on the grounds of the school district headquarters campus off the northeast corner of Monroe Boulevard and 20th Street.

As is, the district rents space to warehouse food used to make student meals at a cost of more than $40,000 over the past two years, according to a district memo on the matter. That cost is expected to rise and, at the same time, the district needs more space to better accommodate its food needs and deal with growing supply-chain issues.

The new facility would contain a test kitchen and training room for post-high school and special education students, giving them experience “on how to use equipment in a commercial-grade kitchen, thus providing better real-world training for our kids,” the memo reads.

Construction would take 12-14 months, with the target opening date in the fall of 2023.

Funds from the $87 million bond, approved by voters in 2018, have been tapped to build a new section on Wasatch Elementary and to revamp and rebuild Polk Elementary. Moreover, the former Horace Mann and T.O. Smith elementary schools were torn down so new schools — East Ridge and Liberty elementary schools, respectively — could be built in their place with bond funds.

The Polk and Liberty projects are to be done in time for the 2022-2023 school year.

According to a report in February from BDK, the contractor handling the school projects, the collective cost for work on the four schools will be $98.73 million.

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