Superintendent Ron Thiele said Monday night that he wasn’t sure if Issaquah parents were ready to start thinking of their schools as “urban.”

“A lot of people move out here because they want a suburban life and they want a suburban school … not a hard-surface area,” he said.

But Thiele said the Issaquah School District was already moving toward denser schools — and if the fifth of its district that shares its name continues moving toward centralized development, denser schools will become a matter of necessity.

“We’re not building any more ramblers,” he said. “Our high schools are three stories, our new middle school is three stories. … We’re not afraid of building a school that accommodates an environment like this; there are just challenges.”

The Issaquah City Council and Issaquah School Board met Monday at the school district’s administration building for a joint meeting to discuss their current projects and “get [their] elbows in the mud,” as school board member Lisa Callan put it, to determine how they could dovetail their agendas. The two parties also hosted a panel of real estate and public development professionals to provide insight into how to approach the urbanization of schools.

Though school Finance Director Jake Kuper noted the staffs of the city and school system meet frequently to discuss practical matters such as the planning and construction of campuses, this week marked the first time the governments’ legislative bodies had met in four years.

At the Mandarin Garden restaurant in April 2012, the school board led a casual discussion about school boundaries, student population projections and potential bond projects.

But the City Council’s intervening passage of the urban-oriented Central Issaquah Plan meant that the city would lead the discussion this time around — a discussion that, for the most part, centered around impending and necessary urbanization.

“We don’t have green, forested land to put development in,” Economic Development Director Keith Niven said.

Currently, the school district doesn’t have any schools inside the 900 acres the city intends to see built up. But if Issaquah collects 21,000 new residents in the next two decades as expected, the families who move into the urban core will be expecting them.

“Nobody moves here because of the weather,” Councilmember Tola Marts said.

Meanwhile, the school district has faced its own explosion in growth. Two-thousand students have enrolled in the past four years and conservative projections for the next five years anticipate 2,000 more. Kuper guessed enrollment since October may have already allowed Issaquah School District to surpass the population of the neighboring Bellevue School District.

As the population grows, it’s also becoming increasingly diverse — students learning English as a second language could almost occupy their own high school, Thiele said.

Thiele called those changes exciting, but he and several members of the school board noted that it forced them to think about growth on a timeline that’s much shorter than the city’s 20-year projections.

The $500 million bond, if passed, would fund the addition of a fourth comprehensive high school, a sixth middle school and two new elementary schools that would likely be built out by 2020.

“[I’m] struck by how we’re dealing with very different time windows,” school board member Suzanne Weaver said. “I think I got halfway through this meeting when I fully wrapped my head around the fact that we’re thinking in terms of four-year timelines while [the city is] thinking about 20.”

Cynthia Berne, one of the guest panelists and a broker with experience in multi-stakeholder projects in Snohomish County, said now was the time for the city and district to start meshing their timelines.

“From here going forward, you can’t work independently anymore,” Berne said. “… Fifty years ago any jurisdiction could act independently and there wasn’t a need for [collaboration] but I think there is a need now and it will only get stronger.”

Weaver noted that it could be a tough sell for families if the school begins building schools that don’t have amenities — such as stadiums and play fields — that have become expected in traditionally suburban areas.

“In a district that talks a lot about equity, that’s a hard sell,” she said.

But another panelist and architect who has worked on several schools in city centers, Lorne McConachie, said urban schools can think outside the box to offer other amenities.

“Urban high schools, if they’re near a hospital for example, could offer medical or birthing classes,” he said. “The campus’ common space could see an intensity of use for youth groups, church groups, community theater groups. These are shifts that are pretty significant in the patterns of use in our facilities — not every high school gets a stadium.”