Returnees to Malibu High School may have to look twice when they hit campus later this month to begin the new 2017-18 school year. The landscape looks a lot different now that the beleaguered middle school building is gone, the old library just a slab and the administration building only a shell of its former self. All summer, demolition crews have been working to raze the old structures for a multimillion-dollar remodeling and rebuilding project funded through bond measures BB, passed in 2006, and ES, passed in 2012.
With deadlines to be met, district staff has been working “round the clock to prepare the school for the first day on August 22,” according to Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District spokesperson Gail Pinsker.
“Work has been going on schedule and we’re very optimistic about everything being where we expected it to be before the start of school,” Pinsker said. “One of the big items is to make sure all of the areas near the construction are fenced off and all of our students and staff will be safe on campus. We also want to make sure that all of our parents are patient at both Malibu High and Juan Cabrillo Elementary School regarding drop-off and pick-up with the construction and some of the new drop-off areas that were provided before school let out in June.
“We want everybody to be safe and cautious as they’re navigating the streets while we are working to build a better, more state-of-the-art school for our Malibu families,” she added.”
Get Your Stuff Day, Aug. 15, for middle school students, will not take place on the middle school quad (with the protruding sharks fins) as in years past. The event that is often an introduction to the school for incoming students will be moved to the high school quad this year. GYSD for high school students is Aug. 16.
One hitch in the reconstruction of the school’s administration building is the discovery this summer of previously unknown underground pipes that are causing a slight delay in swapping the school’s housing of its main data frame—or what’s known as the “brains” of the school.
The room, called the MDF, is located in the administration building and houses the school’s internet, phone, alarms (including the fire alarm), announcement speakers, clocks and such. With the administration building scheduled for demolition, the MDF will be moved to a stand-alone building.
“When we went to build it, the contractor tore up the ground and found gas, sewer and other pipes we didn’t know were there,” SMMUSD Chief Operations Officer Carey Upton explained. “So we had a little bit of unknown condition that has delayed our completion of getting that building done, which means we haven’t switched the MDF over from the admin building yet.”
Upton described the process of preparing for the demolition and moving the MDF.
“You bring in people to do ground penetrating radar. You look at all the things and you think you know what’s underground, but until you dig you don’t know really what’s there,” he said. “When we started digging in that area, we found a lot more than we thought we had to reroute a number of pipes of different types.”
Sometime this fall, a new MDF is scheduled to be swapped out over a weekend to avoid any disruption in school operations.
“It doesn’t actually throw us off schedule,” Upton said. “We’re still on our critical path. We’re just a little delayed.”
In the meantime banks of portable classrooms were moved onto the campus in January that have been used by students since returning from winter break.
The 51-year-old middle school building (also known as Building E), which was found to have harmful PCBs, was demolished in July. It will be replaced with a modular two-story structure that should be up and running by January 2019. The other buildings are set to reopen by December 2019. All the departments are now in portables or housed in other existing structures.
The art, music and wood shop areas that had PCB concerns received new windows and doors and are slated later for new flooring and paint. Next year work will begin to refurbish the old gym, theater and cafeteria.
“Special education got completely done this year because we felt like we just needed to tackle it and give them a better space to work in,” Upton stated.
Craig Foster, Malibu’s representative on the SMMUSD Board of Education also weighed in.
“There’s no question this construction has been and will continue to be disruptive for parents and the neighborhood as long as it’s ongoing, which is a couple of years,” Foster said. “However, I think they’ve done a great job. The district is working hard to get it flowing smoothly.”