The Fremont Unified School District plans to spend about $100,000 to figure out what to do with a donated parcel that’s “unusable” for building the school it needs.

A recent analysis of the roughly 10-acre property the district accepted from the Patterson family, near the Patterson Ranch housing development site in Ardenwood, revealed there’s a 42-inch water pipeline underneath it that serves Hayward.

Because of the large volume of water that could flood the area if the line ruptures or is damaged, a school cannot be built there, the report states.

The district was happy to accept the land in April 2016 because it needs space for a new elementary school to accommodate more students in its already overcrowded campuses. The land is west of Paseo Padre Parkway adjacent to Ardenwood Boulevard, near the intersection of both.

Superintendent Jim Morris described the mostly residential area where the donated property is located as “booming.”

The roughly 500 houses being built by KB Home, Brookfield Residential, and D.R. Horton in the Patterson Ranch development are expected to send about 200 more students into district schools as families continue to move in.

Morris said in an interview last week there’s still hope that a school can be built in the area.

In addition to the school district, the Patterson family donated about 9 acres to the city and 10 acres to a couple of churches that had supported the housing development despite considerable neighborhood opposition, according to a staff report. All those properties are contiguous.

Because the churches decided it would be better to buy or rent other sites on which to build additional facilities, they since sold the donated property to the East Bay Regional Park District for $600,000. The district wanted that land to connect with a 296-acre piece the Pattersons had donated to it as part of Coyote Hills Regional Park.

In late March, Fremont Unified’s Board of Education authorized staff to spend up to $100,000 to hire an architect to “prepare conceptual options for the donated parcel and adjacent parcels.”

Morris said the school district has been communicating with the city and the park district about how they could make a school work on some of their donated land.

“The good thing is 10 acres of land is 10 acres of land,” Morris said. “Maybe we could do some inter-agency swapping of property to come up with a place, so we could have it as a school site in the future.”

The money for the architect will come out of the school district’s pot of developer impact fees, which has about $20 million in it at the moment.

“Coordination will be required with representatives from the City of Fremont and East Bay Regional Park District regarding use of the property,” states the school board’s March staff report.

Morris said although the water line hypothetically could be relocated, that probably would be “prohibitively expensive.”

Currently, there is no firm timeline for choosing an architect to do the land assessment options.

“We really do need a school in that part of town,” Morris said, “so we need to be realistic and see, is there a place we can put a school in on that (contiguous) property.”