New high school is a rare thing

The last time a new high school was built in a Yakima area school district, Aretha Franklin first demanded "Respect," the Vietnam War was in full swing, and the civil rights movement was marked with protest and violence.

Back then, the first phase of a new Davis High School near downtown Yakima was just being completed.

Now, 41 years later, West Valley is about halfway through building its new $48 million high school.

Construction kicked off last July when workers began leveling 40 acres of an apple orchard between the tennis courts of the current high school and the West Valley Fire District Educational Center. The new high school, located next door to the current campus on Zier Road, is about 40 percent done, with completion slated for December 2009.

The walls of a spacious new gym are up. A brick encased elevator shaft points to the sky. The much anticipated common area is still dirt, although things are taking shape around it.

"I'm really excited about the overall flow and organization of the building," said Jim Christensen, president of Architects West, the lead architectural firm on the project.

"The student common area will have a small performance area for presentations or awards banquets. It will be a bright space with a skylight. It will kind of be the hub of the building," he said. "People walking on the upper level will be able to look down on this space."

West Valley is the third newly built high school going up anywhere in Yakima County in the last two decades. The other was Highland High School in Cowiche, which opened in 2001.

Before that, Selah opened a new high school at the start of the 1988-89 school year. It took that project 10 years to secure local funding.

Among Yakima area school districts, the last new high school went up between 1967 and 1975, when voters agreed to finance new science classrooms, a library and cafeteria, and replace the old Yakima High building, a 1908 three-story castle-like structure.

School officials say part of the reason few high schools have been built is simple logistics. High schools are built to last and are the most expensive schools within a district.

"High schools historically have been around for 30 to 50 years," said Milt Ketchum, project manager for West Valley's new high school. "They are a big expenditure for a community. They're more costly because they have a lot more components.

"We design these things to last a long time and that's why you're not seeing them go up all the time," Ketchum added.

There's that -- and getting approval from voters to pay for new schools.

Getting the money to build

Unlike school levies, which pay for operating expenses, construction bonds require 60 percent approval.

West Valley's pitch for a new high school was first presented in the fall of 1998. Then, the proposal was to remodel and renovate the current school, which was built in 1955.

As time passed and three more construction bond requests were turned down by voters, school officials deemed the current high school campus "educationally dysfunctional."

They pointed to the security risks of an open-style campus that has about 150 exterior doors, coupled with space and technology needs, and by May 2006 enough West Valley voters were convinced. A $52.4 million bond passed with 61.4 percent approval -- the fifth try in eight years.

Now, as the new West Valley High School is nearly halfway complete, excitement surrounding the new 237,000-square-foot building is growing with the footprint of the new campus.

"It is coming along fabulously as far as I can tell," said Chris Brown, president of Wray's grocery stores and chairman of the citizens committee that promoted the construction bond for financing.

Brown, who was among a group to tour the shell of a building a few weeks ago, said he's hearing positive feedback from community members, usually about the noticeably large size of the building.

School officials expect to have the new campus ready for 1,000 students in grades 10, 11 and 12 when they return from winter break in January 2010.

As for the existing campus, no decisions have been made, said Tom Fleming, the school district's assistant superintendent of business and operations.

Although district officials and community members have kicked around a few ideas, including making it an elementary school, it's most likely to become a ninth-grade campus, Fleming said. The district's eighth- and ninth-graders currently attend West Valley Junior High.

School officials in the Yakima School District, meanwhile, are trying to figure out how to get support from voters. For the past two years, the district has twice tried to pass a bond measure that would improve or replace at least one of the district's three high schools, Davis, Eisenhower and Stanton Academy.

"My hat's off to them," Yakima schools Superintendent Ben Soria said of West Valley's success. "We believe that we will be able to do the same in the near future."

He added, "It's very difficult, though. I think the situation in Yakima is a little bit more complex than in West Valley because of the changes in demographics. It will take us convincing the community that we deserve their support."

Unlike West Valley's 4,700-student population, which is predominantly white, Yakima's 14,000 students are overwhelmingly Latino.

Build it and they will come

The steel and concrete masonry structure is being built to house 1,500 students instead of 1,200 as originally planned. Providing space for an extra 300 students will cost an additional $2 million. But district officials say they'd rather make the investment now than pay more later.

"It's a savings to build now, rather than five or six years (later) when costs go up even more," said Fleming.

With the preconstruction expansions, the new school will feature 58 classrooms, including eight 1,000-square-feet science labs. Students will also have access to seven computer labs, including one on each side of the library.

The additional 27,000 square feet resulted from a smooth and successful bidding process, said Ketchum, who acts as a liaison between the school district and the architect and general contractors.

That, plus the help of additional state money, allowed for eight additional classrooms and a stairwell, which were part of the long-term expansion plans in the original design.

Technology limitations were among the things teachers and students cited when they asked for a new school. There will be multiple computer terminals throughout the building and plenty of access to the Internet, mostly through wireless connections.

Fleming said the building has a price tag of about $46 million to $48 million for construction. The rest of the money is earmarked for architecture firms, permits and testing, roads and site development, and new furniture.

"It's a huge investment in the community and the growth. It's the growth of Yakima and we have to make sure we have proper facilities for our community moving forward," said Brown.

The school district is using the same architecture firm that designed West Valley Middle School a mile away. Architects West, based in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, also worked on Wilson Middle School in the Yakima School District, Kittitas Middle/High School and Wahluke High School in Mattawa, which opened in 2006.

"One thing about education is that it is always changing and we try to do whatever we can to build in some flexibility in the design and layout," said Christensen, with Architects West.

Having an elevator will make West Valley High wheelchair accessible.

A 500-seat auditorium will connect to the drama room. The district already has an auditorium at the junior high school.

The gym will have a capacity of 2,400 people, all on the first level, and there is a jogging track on the second level. There will be two softball fields and two baseball fields at the high school alone, doubling the number of softball fields in the district.

During the early design discussions for West Valley's High School, a group of teachers, administrators, architects and general contractor visited new schools elsewhere in the state, including Wahluke's new high school, to get ideas.

With security a top concern, the new building in West Valley will feature one main entrance and include a 400-square-foot lobby area that can be locked down, preventing people from leaving or entering the facility.

Ever since the deadly shootings at Columbine High School nine years ago in Colorado, schools want the ability to lock down buildings instantly.

"It's going to provide a much safer environment for the staff and the students," said Brown, West Valley's citizen committee chairman. "The building will give us the ability to control who is coming and going."

The school will ostensibly be defined by a single enclosed building instead of the more open campus design that was popular in the 1960s and 1970s and will have five main exit doors. Additionally, there will be more than 100 security cameras to help school officials monitor hallways and areas around the building. There will be no security cameras in the classrooms.

Aside from the predictable challenges of staying on budget and on schedule, the project hasn't hit any major road blocks and, as of last week, was on time and slightly under budget.

The plan is to get the entire structure up and under one roof by the time cold weather hits this fall so workers can do interior work through winter.

School officials will soon begin preparing a pitch for a bond to replace two elementary schools to address the district's swelling elementary population -- yet another contributing factor for needing a new high school.

Such a request could be before West Valley voters next February.

* James Joyce III can be reached at 577-7675 or jjoyce@yakimaherald.com.