Shortly after Superintendent Steven Keller arrived at the Redondo Beach Unified School District in 2006, he realized something was amiss. One walk through the Redondo Union High School campus was really all it took. Roofs leaked, the swimming pool tilted and cracked, and large varmint-holes made running across playing fields a genuine danger.
Keller didn’t move slowly. He arrived in May. By November, he’d proposed a $92 million district-wide makeover. And on the night of Nov. 28, the school board gave him his answer: a resoundingly unanimous no.
Keller recalled what he ironically called the “favorite night of my life” during his State of Education address last Wednesday.
“I don’t think there is any superintendent in the South Bay in the last 10 years that got an 0-5 vote,” Keller said. “…I played poker. I smiled.”
As he spoke, Keller stood in the new state-of-the-art Performing Arts Center on the spectacularly remade RUHS campus. The 104-year-old, 56-acre campus — which will be officially unveiled at a Nov. 5 ceremony – has received a $95 million overhaul as part of the $145 million Measure C school bond. The construction includes new fields, gyms, a rebuilt library, and a new Student Services Building that comes along with a new address for the campus: One Sea Hawk Way.
Timing was everything. The school board approved Measure C in August 2007, and in February 2008 – with a record high turnout due to interest in the Democratic presidential primary – the voters backed the bond with 65 percent approval.
As RBUSD board president Drew Gamet noted, the community stood for education even as the state began slashing school budgets.
“You stepped up,” Gamet told the roughly 300 people who attended the State of Education address.
Mayor Mike Gin said that RBUSD’s construction has been a positive development in a dark economic time.
“It’s wonderful to see some bright lights,” Gin said. “Thank you for helping make our community the unbelievable, wonderful place it is.”
Measure C has touched all 12 district campuses, and some features have included joint-use agreements with the Beach Cities Health District and other community-wide access, including new athletic fields at the middle schools and the high school’s aquatic center. Construction has been on time and in some cases drastically under budget, due to the recession’s impact on the construction market.
In a video that showed at the beginning of Wednesday’s event, city official and unofficial community historian Pat Dreisler remarked at the significance of the school upgrades.
“I think it is kind of a resurgence, if you will, of what schools are supposed to be,” Dreisler said.
The resurgence is also occurring academically. The district’s standardized test scores, as measured by the state’s Academic Performance Index, have increased from an average of 828 in 2006 to 868 this year (the API is scored 200 to 1,000; the state average is 767).
Keller took special pride in the fact that API scores have been strong throughout the district, upending a former perception that existed in some corners of the community that schools in the wealthier neighborhoods of South Redondo outperformed North Redondo.
“The whole notion, the North-South notion, is nonsense,” Keller said. “All our schools are great.”
Keller named Susan Burden, the CEO of the Beach Cities Health District, as the Educational Advocate of the Year. The school district and the health district have worked together in several ventures, including the innovative “LiveWell Kids” nutrition education program and on a joint-use agreement that will open up the new RUHS aquatic center to the community.
Burden praised Keller and promised that the partnership between BCHD and RBUSD would grow even stronger.
“Dr. Keller has been an extraordinary leader in this community,” Burden said. “And I think the best is yet to come. We are going to do some amazing things together. We haven’t even started.” ER
