A facelift is in store for Healdsburg High School as the school is scheduled to get a brand new gym and locker rooms in 2020.
The new gym is intended to replace Frost Hall, the school’s second gym. The projects are slated to break ground this summer.
Counterpoint Construction Services Project Manager Tenaya Dale gave the Healdsburg Unified School District Board of Trustees an informational report of the planned changes at the board of trustees regular meeting on Wednesday, April 17.
“We have two gyms right now, Smith Robinson is our main gym and I think it was built in the ’60s or ’70s but we just remodeled the inside and redid the roof on it so it’s in very good shape and it will continue to be our main gym,” Healdsburg Unified School District Superintendent Chris Vanden Heuvel explained. “So the gym we are building is going to be a full-size gym so you can have games and whatnot … For instance, if we were hosting a tournament, then we would be able to have two games going.”
The current second gym, Frost Hall, is a bit dated and is also underwhelming in size.
“Frost Hall is undersized. It’s not very useful for games and tournaments so you couldn’t host a basketball game there,” Vanden Heuvel said.
In terms of design, the new locker rooms will all be adjacent to the new gym. And while the new building won’t have quite the same footprint as the Smith Robinson Gym, it will be able to accommodate between 200 and 300.
There will be covered walkways in between and an artificial turf for yoga, Pilates or pick up soccer or volleyball games.
“It will be a really nice central complex,” Vanden Heuvel said.
The HHS project will also include the installation of a new roof on building A, the administration building, upgrades to senior court and the addition of a new HVAC.
It’s in “desperate need of freshening up,” Dale said of the senior court.
Dale added that the roof on building A has seen some “pretty decent leaks,” meriting the need for a replacement.
The new gym, which will be adjacent to the main Smith Robinson Gym, is estimated to take up to 15 months for completion.
Planned construction work also includes updates to Healdsburg Junior High School’s gym as well as the addition of a new science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) classroom and HVAC system.
“It is not a whole lot of new building. It is basically remodeling, replacing plumbing, electrical, redoing the floors and remodeling both the boys and girls locker rooms,” Vanden Heuvel said.
Besides updating old building utilities — the building was erected in the 1920s — one of the bonuses of updating the junior high gym is that it will let more natural light into the room.
According to Dale, all of the projects will be funded based on bond sale cash flow.
Projects to be funded by 2019 bond sales, which amounted to $20 million, include the new HHS gym and boys and girls locker room — estimated to come at a price tag of $12.5 million.
The $20 million bond sale will also fund the junior high gym modernization and new STEM classroom.
Projects to be funded by the 2022 remaining bond sales, which would be $25.2 million, include: a new auditorium at HHS, converting the existing HHS girls locker room to a weight room, adding natural turf to the existing layout of the HHS baseball and softball fields and reconfiguring the HHS pool parking lot.
New curriculum Other changes coming to HHS include a change in U.S. history, world history, government and economics curriculum through TCI, Curriculum for Teachers & Textbook Publishing Company.
The board of trustees voted unanimously in a 3-0 vote to approve the new TCI course materials for the aforementioned courses. Trustees Judy Velasquez and Mike Potmesil were absent.
The TCI package will include six years of print and digital media along with any updates or upgrades at no extra cost.
After the school evaluated and piloted the TCI materials during this 2018-19 school year, district Director of Curriculum and Instruction Erin Fender went ahead to recommend the materials to the school board.
TCI is also known for its collaborative materials, writing assignments and critical thinking problems.
The idea to transition to new curriculum started in July 2016 when the California Department of Education (CDE) adopted a new History/Social Sciences framework and so new instructional material was developed by the CDE.
Consequently, the school started testing materials that aligned with the CDE framework.
According to the agenda item packet, “TCI quickly became the front runner and the teachers began to pilot the online and print materials at the beginning of the 2018-19 school year.”
This particular package will cost $27,554.
