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Partway through her introductory remarks at the Aromas-San Juan Unified School District town hall at Anzar High School on Feb. 6, Superintendent Barbara Dill Varga was interrupted by the delivery of a strange package. Opening a series of colorful nested boxes, she came to the final one, which held a balloon containing a long-awaited letter from the Division of State Architects:
“Dear Barbara, The answer to your question is ‘yes,’ you can replace the requested San Juan School buildings with new construction. That means everything but the gym and F Cluster Middle School Wing can be torn down and replaced with new buildings.”
The school’s fate—to relocate or to rebuild at the current location— depended on the seismic study.
Dill Varga has been anxiously awaiting word on the school’s fate from the state architects. The group has been hinting at a decision since October 2022, based on the results of a series of seismic studies following the 2020 passage of Measure M, which funded basic seismic upgrades and repairs.
“This is confirmation that we have been on the right path,” Dill Varga told BenitoLink. “It’s been a long time coming, and we are looking forward to building a new school that will support student learning for another 60 years.”
The next step for the district is to send finalized design plans for the new school, which were previewed at the town hall meeting, to the Office of Public School Construction to determine the amount of matching funding the state will offer. Dill Varga said there are funds authorized under Measure O, passed in 2020.
“We don’t know what the final number is going to be yet,” she said. “We have $30.5 million under Measure O, but that is not going to be enough. We need to close the gap with what the state gives us.”
Dill Varga said that if the state funds are insufficient, the district has “healthy reserves” it can use to complete the job.
In the meantime, the district also has to seek approval from, among others, the Public Safety Commission, the Department of Education and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Daniel Ornelas, the chief business official for the district, said that having to rebuild the school based on the seismic report gives San Juan School a priority for funding consideration.
“We are jumping to the front of the line, in front of other school districts for facility projects,” he said. “So this is very big news for us.”
Ornelas said that having worked closely with the stakeholders, there is a firm consensus on the design and the ideas behind it.
“The design of the front of the campus and where the classrooms are is pretty much set,” he said. “We’re really happy in terms of confidence level.”
The current plan, once the funds have been secured, is to start construction sometime in August or September.
“I think it’ll mean phasing it in,” Ornelas said, “so that while we’re working on one section of the campus, we have classrooms that are still available in another section. We will be creative right now—why use the library as a library which can be three classrooms?”
The town hall was the latest in a series of discussions about the district’s future. Previous sessions have included deciding on the layout of the new school, workshops on classroom design and strategic goals for improving student performance.
Though scheduled at 6 p.m., there was an “early bird” tour of the three high school classrooms—Spanish, history, and biology—that had been renovated during the winter break using design ideas derived from a week-long in-person study undertaken in January 2023 by educational consultant David Jakes.
The new classrooms feature extensive use of whiteboards, tables at different heights that allow students to sit or stand while working and innovative chairs that can be used as seats in four different ways. The chairs and tables are on wheels, which allows the space to be instantly reconfigured to meet the needs of particular lessons. During the town hall, Dill Varga played a video of a third grade class completely rearranging their desks and chairs in less than one minute.
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