Design for New School Starts to Take Shape

Mike Tarantino described it as turning "words into pictures."

From a wall of ideas written in colored marker—"natural light";"high windows"; "outdoor lab space"—has emerged a vision for a handful of high-tech "villages" to form what could be the Poway Unified School District's first K-8 campus.

It would be the elastic waistband for an expanding westside near 4S Ranch and Black Mountain Ranch, where elementary schools like Monterey Ridge are bursting buttons, and Oak Valley Middle School will soon start popping threads.

Del Norte High School, which graduates its first senior class this year and lies just south of the K-8's possible construction site, still has room, but that could change.

For three days, students, teachers, administrators, community members and staff from the BakerNowicki Design Studio and Echo Pacific Construction collaborated in an extended brainstorming session, wrapping up Thursday afternoon with the foundation of a plan.

The layout includes fields that stretch across the northside of the school site along Camino del Norte and wrap around classrooms in the middle to extend along the eastside of the site along Lone Quail Road. There's a turnout area for buses on the southside of the site and a parking lot on the southwest side of campus.

Students will be divided into five, two-story "villages" designed to build community among students and teachers, each holding 150 students for a total of 1,500 students. How many will be elementary students vs. middle schoolers hasn't been determined and could change as the population shifts in the region, said Tarantino, who oversees the district's maintenance and operations.

At the heart of the villages will be an outdoor amphitheater, gym, departmental buildings and a multipurpose room.

With all of that, however, it's possible that the design could change with further input and the district could opt not to create a school at all, though that seems unlikely considering the already-present overcrowding on that side of the district.

Tarantino offered a rough timeline of the upcoming process:

• Now to mid-2012: Community symposiums and design discussion. BakerNowicki and Echo Pacific use 3D BIM technology to craft the final design. The technology should help prevent conflict later by alerting designers to problems during the drafting stage, Tarantino said.
• Mid-2012: School board decides whether to move forward with the project and approves final design created with 3D BIM technology.
• Mid-2012 to early 2013: Division of the State Architect (DSA) signs off on the final design and gives the district clearance to start construction.
• Early 2013: Construction begins with an aggressive timeline for completion. Officials usually anticipate spending a year building an elementary school, a couple of years for a middle school and up to five years for a high school.
• Fall 2014: School opens.

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