Plans for the latest addition to the Hermosa Beach City School District are progressing toward reality, with the district juggling neighborhood concerns while opening to complete construction in time for the start of the 2019-20 school year.
A series of district and school board meetings this month demonstrated ongoing resident concern with the construction of North School, a district property west of Valley Park that once served as a neighborhood school and is now leased to preschool programs. Relying on money from facilities bond Measure S, which Hermosa voters approved last June, the district plans to totally redesign and reopen the school for third and fourth graders to relieve crowding at existing campuses.
Funds from Measure S will go toward improvements at View and Valley, which now serve kindergarten through third grade and fourth through eighth grades respectively. But the lion’s share of the money — and resident concern — has been focused on North.
The district held three community outreach meetings this month, one to discuss each campus. Nathan Herrero, a project manager for SVA Architects, the firm the district hired to carry out design work for Measure S, said that North had received “by far” the most feedback. The most common concern cited, he said, has been traffic.
Plans call for 17 classrooms at the school, although several of these are expected to hold labs or other facilities not dedicated for continuous student use. State law, relying on a figure of 30 kids per classroom, requires the district to assess impact for up to 510 students. But based on current enrollment, the district projects about 300 students will attend North in its first year.
During the run-up to the vote on Measure S, backers said that North’s population of third- and fourth-grade students would alleviate traffic in the area, because at least some of the students would be able to walk or bike to campus. This assertion was disputed during the campaign, a theme which continued this month.
“It isn’t going to happen. No one from the south or east end of town is going to send their kid to school on a bike,” said Blair Smith, who lives directly across from the school’s proposed 25th Street entrance, at the scoping meeting for the environmental impact report for the North School proposal.
Current plans for the school call for classrooms and administrative buildings to be located along 25th street. Herrero said that reducing traffic at dropoff and pickup times would be to increase the number of places where students can enter and exit the school.
“The key thing is dropoff and pickup won’t be concentrated in one place. It’s showing a drop-off lane on 25th, but that is by no means the only way to get into campus,” he said, suggesting alternatives including 26th Street to the north and through Valley Park to the east.
Superintendent Pat Escalante said that the district was also exploring other measures to calm traffic in the area. These include a walking school bus with remote dropoff and pickup locations, and traffic signs prohibiting turning south into the residential neighborhood when exiting the school. Most if not all of these plans will require collaboration with the city, and discussions are still in preliminary stages. The city, for its part, is awaiting completion of a traffic study for the school, said Leanne Singleton, an environmental analyst with the city of Hermosa Beach.
The district is also working to accommodate concerns about the safety of the students who do walk to the campus. Efforts to outline paths to campus under the Safe Routes to School program are underway. Student routes to North School are embodied in the mobility section of PLAN Hermosa, the city’s update to its General Plan and Local Coastal Program, Singleton said.
“We wanted to make sure we aren’t direct down through the Valley neighborhood where there are no sidewalks,” Escalante said.
The decision to join the administrative offices with classrooms, and to position it along 25th Street, also produced skepticism from residents, who worried that the large, two-story structure could impede coastal vistas. The final height of the structure is not yet determined, but Herrero said that SVA was looking at ways to lower the roof.
Architects said that the administrative and classroom structures were combined for reasons of both energy and cost efficiency. Buildings in Southern California are better able to rely on natural light when they run east-west, Herrero said. And splitting the two would have made it hard to create one contiguous play area, complicating monitoring of students during lunch and recess periods.
Under current plans, an asphalt play area will run between classrooms and an auditorium, while a grass field and nature lab will rim the campus’ east edge. Designs call extending for the playing field to extend out onto the ice plant-covered slope at Valley Park’s western edge, although revisions to the plans have scaled back the portion of the slope affected.
