HADLEY — Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School’s planned expansion to a second campus is continuing with the acquisition of a two-story, 80,000-square-foot building at 300 Venture Way.

The school recently finalized the $7.15 million deal to buy the building, located in the professional park off North Maple Street, from Pearson Assessments. The building sits on a roughly 15-acre site.

Richard Alcorn, the school’s executive director, first announced the plans and a purchase-and-sale agreement in February to the town’s Planning Board, with the upper floor to become classroom space for the middle or high school this fall, and with about 180 students to be taught there. About 10,000 square feet of office space on the first floor would be leased back to Pearson.

The new building supplements the existing classroom space at the 317 Russell St. campus, where the school has been since 2008, after taking over the Kidsports building and then undertaking an expansion project.

In early June, the Planning Board waived further site plan approval after accepting a professional traffic study Alcorn commissioned from Fuss & O’Neill engineers. That report showed that there would be less traffic from the school use than a fully occupied office building.

The new site could possibly have a preschool on the first floor, and conversion of a storage building into a gymnasium, Alcorn told planners.

PVCICS currently enrolls around 560 students in grades K-12 from nearly 30 communities in the Pioneer Valley, according to its website.

Having a second campus will also solve a problem that arose during the past school year, when students, families and staff were prohibited from using the neighboring Mountain Farms Mall parking lot. The school then came to an agreement with the Hampshire Mall to use the parking lot near the west end of the JC Penney store, meaning those students who drove to school would have a longer walk.

Then known as National Evaluation Systems, Pearson moved to Venture Way from Amherst in 2002. The company has been looking to reduce its building footprint in recent years, submitting the property, for a $20 million sale price, in response to the town of Amherst’s 2021 search for a site to build a new Department of Public Works. Amherst officials didn’t pursue that option for a DPW location.

The 300 Venture Way building also is connected to 400 Venture Way via an overhead walkway following an earlier expansion by Pearson. In 2018, that neighboring building was sold to the University of Massachusetts Building Authority and is now used by the Information Technology department at UMass.

Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.