School plans to use remaining Measure E funds for additional renovations, but a new gym won’t be among them

As workers begin renovating the 800 wing into a new Student Center that will open in the fall, school officials decided to designate the remaining Measure E bond funds to go to other refurbishments around the campus.

According to principal Paul Robinson, the school is planning to modernize several buildings. The renovations include updating the administration building and 900 wing, which houses robotics, fixing the school’s ventilation systems and reroofing parts of the school.

With $44 million available for renovations from Measure E money, administrators were forced to cut down on their wish list of projects in order to meet a budget.

Perhaps the most prominent project that won’t be built is an additional gym on campus to help avoid the conflicting schedules of various sports teams and music groups such as winter guard. With the limited gym space, teams like badminton are sometimes forced have practices from 7 to 9 p.m.

“Since we share gym space with volleyball as our seasons overlap, and our teams consists of a large amount of people,” badminton caption Nathan Luk said. “There's a lot of waiting for a court to open up, so players do not actually play the full time they are at practice.”

As the Measure E planning process went on, administrators realized there was not an appropriate place on campus to build an extra gym. The original idea was to build a facility where the Team Room now stands, but it turned out, the footprint was not big enough and would have cut into the pool.

With the lack of space on campus for such a facility, the overcrowding in the Large and Small Gyms will continue.

“It’s hard, especially this time of year for badminton,” Robinson said. “With our winter sports doing well and going into the CSS playoffs for multiple weeks, it’s hard to find time in our gym, and we try the best we can.”

Robinson does foresee some hope for projects that were part of the original wish list but didn’t fit into early budget projections.

One example is changing the baseball field grass to artificial turf.

“That was the very next project right below the cutline,” Robinson said. “So, if there is enough money left in the budget or left in the Measure E funds to be able to do that, [the school board] would do it.”