Tommy Kunst Junior High School will soon be able to house 270 more students with 12 new classrooms that are scheduled for completion before the 2015-2016 school year starts.
Construction hasn’t yet begun, but the Santa Maria-Bonita School District’s School Board unanimously awarded a $3.7-million contract to the Vernon Edwards Constructors of Santa Maria during a special meeting on July 31. Assistant Superintendent of Business Services Matt Beecher said construction would begin as soon as all the insurance and bond paperwork was in order.
Two new buildings with six classrooms each will be plopped onto the eastern side of campus in a space that was earmarked for expansion when the junior high was originally built.
Beecher said the extra classrooms would help the school district deal with growing enrollment numbers. The newest addition to Santa Maria-Bonita—the Aquistapace Elementary School project currently under construction—is also gaining an extra six-classroom building to help with the district’s ever-increasing volume of students.
When Aquistapace’s designs were submitted to the state in 2008, there was a spot on the campus footprint squirreled away for expansion needs. Since then, the district’s enrollment has continued to expand, so the district decided it needed to fill the spot before the school has students roaming its halls.
The classroom building adds another $2.5 million to the overall cost of constructing Aquistapace, bringing the grand total for the project to a little more than $19 million.
“At Aquistapace, we already know there’s a need, and so we’re going to expand on that footprint now,” Beecher said.
This article appears in Aug 7-14, 2014.
