The Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) Board of Education approved conceptual design plans on Sept. 22 to construct two new academic buildings and a second gym at Gunn in the next 10 years. The construction will cost about $80 million and will be funded by bond Measure A, passed in June 2008. “The construction plans have our full support,” Assistant Principal of Facilities Tom Jacoubowsky said. “It is a necessary step for us to cope with Gunn’s growing enrollment.”

The district hopes to begin construction in fall 2010. The 27 portable buildings in the Village will be moved to the back of the parking lot near the tennis courts in summer 2010 to accommodate the construction of a new two-story building that will house 28 math and English classrooms. “In the short term, the kids will have a little farther to walk, but the learning will continue,” Superintendent Kevin Skelly said. The portables will take up an additional 58 parking spaces, but will not significantly affect student parking. “Mr. Jacoubowsky went out one day this year and counted the available parking spaces in the parking lot, and he found that the number of available parking spaces that day exceeded the number of parking spaces that will be lost,” Math Instructional Supervisor Jeanne Beck said.

The new Village building is scheduled for completion in January 2013 so that the current freshmen class will be able to use it in the second semester of their senior year, according to Beck. The new classrooms will be larger in size and have cross-ventilation in each room. “Ventilation is a major concern in planning these buildings,” Jacoubowsky said. “Some of the [current] classrooms without air conditioning are unbearable on hot days, so that’s something to be improved on in the new buildings.”

Representatives from Gunn attended the PAUSD Board of Education meeting on Sept. 22 to input their opinions and expressed concerns about the plans for air conditioning (AC) in the new building. “We wanted to raise a point that as we’re doing all this new construction, it’s not okay to not take the issue of ventilation into consideration,” Beck said. The school board responded to this problem last Wednesday by deciding to conduct a study to investigate the cost of AC in the existing classrooms.

The district plans to include a multipurpose room in the new Village building where two classes can meet at once and is separated by a special soundproof wall. It will also have an elevator accessible to disabled students. The stairs will create an arena-style seating during outdoor presentations in the courtyard.

The math classrooms currently have 10 smart boards which will be moved to the projected 14 new math classrooms on the second floor once the new building is completed. An LCD projector will also be mounted in each room after the smart boards are installed, according to Beck.

Both Beck and Jacoubowsky believe that the new building will help alleviate Gunn’s increased population. “The new classrooms are designed to give us more room which will help as long as class sizes don’t keep increasing,” Beck said. “The most students we could comfortably fit into one room would probably be 36.” Once the new two-story building is completed, the special education classrooms and offices will be relocated from the T portables and RC building to the current math building.

“Construction impacts a lot of classes, but the vision for more space and new facilities that we’re going to have is worth the growing pains that we have to experience.”
–Math Instructional Supervisor Jeanne Beck

The school will also simultaneously begin work on a new single-story building for World Language classes. The new building will be located in the grassy area in front of the science and language buildings. It will include five classrooms, language instructor offices, conference rooms, an outdoor patio and a kitchen. “Overall, we need an upgraded environment and more classrooms for world languages,” World Languages Instructional Supervisor Anne Jensen said.

Currently, most language classrooms are shared between teachers. New classrooms will eliminate the problem by accommodating teachers without rooms. The new classrooms are specifically designed to remedy problems that are faced in current classrooms such as lack of storage and dim lighting.

According to Jensen, ventilation is a concern for the new World Languages building as well. “If there are to be renovations, ventilation has to be addressed,” Jensen said. “On hot days, the classrooms can get up to 90 degrees [Fahrenheit]. The district has said that alternatives to air conditioning with green technology would be used in the new buildings. Whatever is going to be used has to be an improvement on what we currently have.”

The district will begin constructing a new gym, fitness center and locker rooms for home and visiting teams June 2010 and hopes to complete the project in two years. The new gym will be located next to the swimming pool and will take up three of the seven existing tennis courts, including half of Willie’s Court. However, four new courts will be built behind the remaining courts and three outdoor basketball courts will be constructed between the swimming pool and the baseball diamond.

According to Athletic Director Chris Horpel, the new gym will be the primary competition site for most teams once it is completed, but practices and some competitions will still take place in the old gym. Once the new gym is completed, the district plans to tear down the wall between the dance studio and the wrestling room in the old gym to create one large wrestling room, according to Horpel. They will also build a large storage room on one side for Physical Education and wrestling equipment.

Construction on the old and new gyms will not exacerbate the problem of multiple teams practicing in the same location as sports seasons transition, according to Horpel. “We will not touch the old gym until the new gym is complete, so it will not create more issues with overlapping seasons,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We will deal with the same old issues of overlapping seasons until the new gym is complete, then we can upgrade our old gym, then we will no longer have the issues we currently have.”

Horpel believes that the construction is definitely worth the benefits. “When Gunn was first built, there was only one girls’ sport and a total of 15 teams, counting varsity and junior varsity,” Horpel wrote in an e-mail. “Now, there are 50 teams (25 girls’ and 25 boys’). We also started as a three-year high school for the first 10 years. When we became a four-year high school in 1975, our numbers jumped to about 1,000 students. We are soon expected to have about 2,300. More students means more student-athletes and therefore a greater necessity for more facilities. Gunn was fine for when it was first built, but we need more facilities to accommodate our new numbers.”

The Facilities Steering Committee at Gunn, which includes Principal Noreen Likins, Jacoubowsky and the Instructional Supervisors, worked with the PAUSD Board of Education and PAUSD design consultant Deems Lewis McKinley Architecture (DLM) to plan the new buildings. During a meeting in the staff lounge on Oct. 7, PAUSD Facilities Management Consultant Tom Hodges explained the plans to Gunn faculty members in more detail.

Though the new buildings will help make classroom sizes smaller, they will not particularly affect the teaching styles and effectiveness of teachers, according to Beck. “It’s not the room; it’s the teacher who makes learning happen in a classroom,” Beck said.

Skelly acknowledges that construction noise is distracting to students in class, but believes the long-term benefits make the construction worth it. “Construction going on during the school year will make it tight around the school, but that’s the price of progress,” Skelly said. Beck agrees. “Construction impacts a lot of classes, but the vision for more space and new facilities that we’re going to have is worth the growing pains that we have to experience,” she said.

The schematic design will be up for approval by the PAUSD Board of Education in December.