Santa Maria-Bonita School District will acquire 26 portable buildings to accommodate the growing student population, following a unanimous vote from the district’s board of trustees last week.
The district will place the buildings on 11 of its 20 campuses starting next school year, according to Public Information Officer Maggie White.
About half of the portables will go to three junior high campuses—Arellanes, Fesler, and El Camino—and the rest will go to elementary campuses. Interim Superintendent Matt Beecher said the district will distribute the portables as such because it expects particular growth for its junior high schools next year.
“What we’ve seen in the last eight years has been a procession of increased enrollment,” Beecher said. “We had a significant increase in births at Marian [Marian Medical Center] in our ZIP code 12 years ago, and that has been sustained year after year. In 2007 or so, they started enrolling in kindergarten, bringing an extra 300 students in just that grade level.”
Now, those students are hitting junior high school, and Beecher said Santa Maria-Bonita will be ready with plenty of classroom space.
A few portables will go to extracurricular activities and services. For example, one of Arellanes’ new buildings will be set aside for special education services. But White said the vast majority of the district’s new buildings will become classrooms.
“Most of them will be for enrollment growth,” White said. “We’re expecting about another 450 to 500 students next year. We continue to grow. We’re one of the few districts in the area that grows every year.”
In fact, White said some of the district’s campuses were built for 500 students but are now supporting 900. Measure T, approved by voters in 2014, will help accommodate the student increase in some respects by pouring $45 million into a new elementary campus and renovations for the district’s existing campuses.
Still, the district needs immediate relief for overflowing classrooms.
“For certain the new elementary school would help relieve overcrowding, but it is frankly a few years down the line,” White said. “That’s going to help with some overcrowding issues and provide some space, but that wasn’t the intent for most of the projects.”
That’s where the portables come in.
White estimated the buildings will cost between $1.2 million and $1.6 million—but this only accounts for delivery, refurbishing, and placing the buildings onsite. Beecher said once utilities and additional site work comes into play, the project will more likely cost between $2.4 million and $3 million.
White said the portable classrooms are a long-term investment for the district.
“Very rarely are portable classrooms removed from a campus,” she said. “It just doesn’t happen, for better or for worse. Once they’re there, they’re kind of permanent.”
Even if for some reason a campus’s enrollment sharply decreased, White said, the school would employ its portables for band practice, speech therapy, conference space, or a staff lounge.
“In the odd case that a portable wasn’t needed for a classroom, there would be a use for it on the campus in some way,” she said.
This article appears in Feb 18-25, 2016.
