For the third time in 10 years, Quaker Valley students will head north to Ambridge for classes beginning in the fall of 2011, this time to clear the way for a $23 million renovation of the district's lone middle school.

The school board voted unanimously Tuesday to send students entering seventh and eighth grades to Ambridge's vacant Anthony Wayne Elementary School at a cost of $4,000 a month in rent. Classes for sixth-graders are scheduled for Osborne Elementary School, the larger of the district's two elementary schools. The kindergarten at Osborne will move to Edgeworth Elementary School.

"We considered trailers, we considered a former Catholic school in Baden, and we looked at schools in Moon," said board member and facilities committee chairman David Pusateri after the meeting. "But I think it came down to, No. 1, that this worked for us in the past and it worked smoothly."

The move will affect about 475 students, superintendent Joseph Clapper said.

"We didn't want to have our middle-schoolers in the building during renovations," he said. "It's that simple."

He said Anthony Wayne was not big enough to take all the students from Quaker Valley Middle School, which educates sixth- through eighth-graders. Administrators and board members studied options for about a year, Mr. Clapper said.

"But we had to move forward with the renovations," he said. "Based on our projections, we expect enrollment there to rise to 515 [or] 520, and we don't have room for the 475 we have now."

In addition to rent, Mr. Clapper said, the district will pay utilities and maintenance costs at Anthony Wayne.

"We're lucky there, though, because we'd be paying those anyway at our middle school," he said. "That shouldn't turn out to be any extra cost."

Elementary students from Quaker Valley took classes at Anthony Wayne while the district renovated its own schools twice before. In 2005, Edgeworth students moved into Anthony Wayne. The next school year, when work on Edgeworth was complete, Osborne students succeeded them.

The district's director of administrative services, Joe Marrone, said the boilers had been turned on at Anthony Wayne, and that other work has begun.

Fresh glazing on windows, air-quality and water-quality testing, and updated security are among the top priorities, Mr. Marrone said.

"We might move some lockers over from the middle school," Mr. Marrone said. "All the existing lockers at Anthony Wayne are internal to the classrooms."

Mr. Marrone said administrators took a fresh look at Anthony Wayne as an option this time.

"Even though we ran it as elementary schools, we had to re-evaluate it as a middle school," he said.