Crews have begun tearing down a long-vacant Shawnee Mission School District building in Overland Park to make way for a skilled nursing facility.
The property in question, at 7235 Antioch Road, is on the Overland Park side of Antioch, across the street from Merriam. City officials recently approved a demolition permit for the property, said Meg Ralph, director of strategic communications for the city, in an email.
The most recent development plans for the site are nearly a decade old, but Ralph said no new applications have been filed with the city. That suggests the demolition could be making way for the long-promised 120-bed skilled nursing and rehabilitation care facility.
What are the plans for 7235 Antioch Road?
In 2016, Overland Park approved a request to build an 85,000 square-foot health care facility at the site. That application was submitted by Sunbelt Health Care Centers, an affiliate of Adventist Health System. It detailed plans for the new two-story facility to have a capacity of 120 beds.
At the time, Jody Barry from Sunbelt Health Care estimated the price tag to be around $20 million, but that was nearly a decade ago. Barry, at the time, also lamented a growing need for these kinds of skilled nursing facilities as more patients recover from hospital stays in lower-cost rehabs.
“Say your 80-year-old grandmother falls and breaks her hip and stays in the hospital for three days,” Barry said in 2016. “She can’t simply go home. The hospital cost is $5,000 per day or she can come to our facility and receive daily physical therapy and hopefully go home in a few weeks and be independent again.”
The project required a special-use permit for an indefinite period, as the property is zoned for single-family residential development.
During the initial approval process, some neighbors in both Overland Park and Merriam pushed back, concerned about the intensity of the use for the health care facility and the size of the building planned compared to the old school district office.
They also worried about traffic the facility would generate, as well as noise from things like generators and HVACs.
Since the city signed off on the special use permit in 2016, Overland Park also approved the preliminary and final plats for the property later that same year.
In 2018, Adventist Health changed its name to AdventHealth.
According to Johnson County land records, AdventHealth still owns the site via Shawnee Medical Center, Inc. AdventHealth has a large footprint in that area, including its sprawling Shawnee Mission campus just to the south at the corner of 75th and Antioch.
SMSD occupied the property in the past
Previously, the 38,000-square-foot building at 7235 Antioch served as the McEachen Administrative Building, holding district offices for the Shawnee Mission School District. It was originally built in 1967.
Even in 2016, it was clear the building would need to be demolished to make room for the new health care facility on the 4.6-acre property, according to city records.
The Shawnee Mission School District sold the building in early 2016 for $2 million. Under that agreement, the school district continued to use the space through mid-2017 by leasing it back from the healthcare company for $1 a month.
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