School board approves construction plans for View
Hermosa View School. Photo
School board members this week selected a construction plan for Hermosa View School that they hope will allow them to use potential school facilities bonds that California voters may approve next year.
In a unanimous vote Monday night, the Hermosa Beach City School District’s Board of Education selected a plan that sets aside $21 million for new construction at View, the east Hermosa campus that houses the district’s youngest students and has in recent years relied extensively on temporary trailer classrooms. It was less expensive than another option, which would have cost an estimated $23 million.
The two plans are similar and both would have resulted in dramatic changes at View. But the less expensive plan leaves work on six existing classrooms at View for the future, when several million dollars in bond funds for modernization could become available.
Board members said that the decision was their attempt to best meet the promise of Measure S, a $59 million school facilities bond measure Hermosa voters approved in 2016 to address overcrowding in the city school district. While much of the attention regarding Measure S has focused on the reopening of North School, a campus now under construction that will eventually house district third- and fourth-graders, the bond measure also promised to finance extensive reconstruction at View, and modernization work at Hermosa Valley School and the district offices.
“In 2016, the community urged the board to do a three-site solution with the passage of Bond Measure S. [This option] allows us to do that, and focus on all three school sites in a responsible manner,” said board member Maggie Bove-LaMonica.
Financial constraints played a role in the board’s decision. At a board meeting last month, Bob Simons, owner of SVA Architects, the firm handling designs for Measure S projects, told board members that, if it were to select the most expensive option for View, it could leave the district more than $1 million short of the estimated costs of the upgrades at Valley. So far, $32.4 million of the $59 million from Measure S has been appropriated, with the vast majority of it going toward North.
Choosing the less expensive option leaves the district enough money to do what the language of the bond measure promised for Valley, board members said, while allowing for the submission of View plans to the Division of the State Architect, which approves school campuses. Doing so as soon as possible could help the district land additional funds from the state in the near future.
In October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed state legislation that will put a $15 billion school facilities bond, to be known as Proposition 13, to the state’s voters in the March 2020 election. Of that money, $9 billion will be set aside for K-12 campuses. There is no guarantee that Hermosa will be allotted any of those funds. In a signing ceremony for the enabling legislation, Newsom said that, if the bond passed, the state would prioritize using the money as matching funds for construction projects at school sites that have lead in their drinking water, seismic safety concerns, or other grave health and safety issues.
The construction at View will also give the district enough space to return to a full-day kindergarten schedule, something it previously had to abandon because of overcrowding. Bringing it back would qualify the district for another group of special state funds for campuses with the full-day schedule.
“Those are two buckets of money that we want to make sure we can get in line for,” Hermosa schools Superintendent Patricia Escalante said earlier this week.
During the campaign for Measure S, which came before voters in June 2016, board members had said that the timing would allow them to take advantage of Proposition 51, a statewide school facilities bond that voters approved five months later, the first California voters had okayed in a decade. Prop. 51 passed and allocated $7 billion to K-12 schools, but legal challenges to the reopening of North delayed the district’s ability to submit plans to the state and take advantage of those funds.