MUSD celebrates construction progress on 2nd high school

In May, it was a working pecan farm. Today, a high school is sprouting.

The Maricopa Unified School District held a gymnasium preview Friday to celebrate construction progress on the district’s second high school – and that progress is stunning.

In just five months, the district’s construction partners – Chasse Building Team, Facilities Management Group and Orcutt-Winslow Architects – have created an identifiable high school campus.

The gym’s concrete floor is fully in place, along with the beginnings of walls. The classroom building has walls to the full two-story height on the north side of the facility, and the cafeteria, kitchen and restrooms are taking shape.

MUSD Governing Board member Robert Downey put the progress into perspective.

“I just had a new house built here in town,” he said. “Nine months, lots of labor shortage complaints, lots of material complaints, lots of delays. And they’re building a high school in basically 12 months. It’s incredible what they’re doing, and they are still on schedule and on budget, even with a monsoon season this year.”

The scope of the school has grown since its conception as well. Originally conceived as a “bare bones” high school with just two buildings – one for classrooms, the other a gym/cafeteria – the district received an additional $18.8 million from the state legislature earlier this year, thanks in large part to the efforts of former state Rep. Bret Roberts, R-Maricopa. That money is going a long way to eliminating the “bare bones” label.

In addition to the original classroom and gym buildings, the school will now have an administration building, where principal Marlene Armstrong and other school administrators, a nurse, counselors and other staff will work. Originally, they were to be housed in offices in the classroom building.

“We were going to have to dedicate five or six classrooms in the classroom building to those student services,” said MUSD superintendent Tracey Lopeman. “Then we were going to have to retrofit all that, tear it all down, reconstruct it and turn it back into classrooms. Now we don’t have to do that because we’re going to accelerate the student services building.”

According to Mark Rafferty, a partner in Facility Management Group, the student services building has been folded into phase 1 of the project and will begin construction in early December.

The additional funding also will allow construction of a student commons building with a library and other student-focused services – Rafferty said work will begin in May or June – plus the following athletics-related features:

• full artificial turf football field
• practice fields for sports and the band
• AIA-certified varsity and junior varsity baseball and softball fields
• a synthetic track encircling the football field
• restrooms and concession areas
• locker room facilities

City Councilmember Bob Marsh said the school is important not just in terms of educating district students, but to the overall progress of the city.

“It really opens up the east side of town and it doubles our opportunity to grow,” Marsh said. “If you look at maps of the city and the projects that are blooming around here because of this school, they’d be amazed.”

Tom Beckett, MUSD director of human resources, said the new school is expected to open with just under 700 students in August. The school, which currently is going through a naming process, will have current freshmen and 8^th graders on site as freshmen and sophomores. The school will fill over the following two years as classes are promoted.

The district will reassign personnel to fill faculty and staff positions at the new school rather than hiring additional staff.