School plans for renovations soon to be decided by bond

A school repair bond, which covers funding for possible renovations for both Saratoga High School and Los Gatos High School and requires 55 percent of voters to pass, is on the June 3 ballot. If passed, $99 million would be given to both schools for renovations and upgrading current technology.

The school repair bond, called Measure E, is similar to the Measure B bond passed in 1998, the last time the schools started major facility upgrades.

Principal Paul Robinson said the Measure E campaign includes informational mailings and a phone bank where people call voters to gain support.

“Voter turnout for these types of elections are low, so it’s important that [we] get the folks that support [the] measure to get to the polls on June 3,” Robinson said. “If all of [our] supporters vote, then it should pass.”

The bond will cover updating old classrooms, science labs and educational technology to 21st-century standards; repairing aged and leaky roofs; making athletic facility improvements; providing additions to music and theater facilities and supporting more strategies for energy conservation and management on campus.

Assistant principal Kevin Mount said the process of drafting the master plan required a lot of collaboration with Bartos Architecture, the firm that the district is working with for the upgrades.

Mount said school leaders have received a lot of input from different groups.

“There was a series of stakeholder meetings where different groups came in and provided input, stating what they wanted,” Mount said. “It was a pretty long process.”

Mount added that the architecture firm provided most of its input in the planning phrases of the plan.

“The firm presented a variety of scenarios in terms of how we might do some things,” Mount said. “Many people weighed in their opinions, and we narrowed down the scenarios, some because we needed way more money than we could ask for. The master plan was assembled, taken down to the Board of Trustees for the district, and the Board ultimately adopted a version of the master plan.”

Robinson added that the the Green Team is also helping with the green renovations by working with the SHS Design Team to go over the scope of the projects and give input to the architects.

“The obvious energy savings by becoming as green as possible will help tremendously,” Robinson said. “We will always have energy costs, but with some newer green technology we hope to decrease those expenses.”

Robinson hopes that the bond will ultimately pass, and if it does, the school has a lot of work to do.

“It could take [five to 10] years to complete everything,” Robinson said. “There are too many unknowns to define the scope exactly and it’ll be a lot of work to bring SHS into the 21st century, but it’ll be very exciting.”