$26M Expansion At Banning High School Set For 2020 Openings

BANNING, CA — Construction on two new multimillion dollar facilities is well underway at Banning High School, and if all goes as planned students enrolled during the 2020-21 school year will see grand openings.

Approximately one year ago, groundbreaking for a Performing Arts Center as well as a Construction Academy got underway at the campus. Together, those projects total $26 million.

The 27,000-square-foot Performing Arts Center — with a professional stage, orchestra pit, dressing rooms, green room, 670-seat theater, classroom space, and media and TV production facilities — is slated to open in December 2020.

The nearly 12,000-square-foot Construction Academy — featuring the latest equipment, work areas and classrooms for the building trades, as well as an outside auto lift — is scheduled to open this summer.

The facilities are being constructed side-by-side at the western edge of the campus; bond money is financing the projects.

Last April, Banning High School Dean of Students Dr. Michael O'Neill, and Banning High School Carpentry Teacher Steven De La Portilla submitted a column to Patch about the projects, stating that students need a variety of career-tech paths to explore while still in high school. The new facilities (along with existing career-tech programs already in place on the campus) will offer students further career-tech opportunities, according to the two educators.

"Career-tech education offers students college prep classes and real-world technical training so they are college and career ready," O'Neill and De La Portilla wrote.

"At Banning High, career-tech education students start by sampling classes leading to careers in film, business, medicine, law enforcement, construction, theater, and the armed forces," O'Neill and De La Portilla continued. "Once they take interest in a particular profession, they complete course sequences for that field combined with college prep classes in English, math, science, and foreign language. Students can investigate nearly 60 careers involving more than a dozen industries in California."