District officials plan to spend $100 million rebuilding Memorial Preparatory, the district’s oldest middle school, a San Diego Unified spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday.
Voice of San Diego Education Reporter Mario Koran broke the news Wednesday about the planned renovations for Memorial Prep, a neglected and long-struggling middle school in Logan Heights.
“Over the weekend, there was a community meeting with (San Diego City Councilman) David Alvarez, and (School Board Trustee) Richard Barrera, and they basically announced plans to rebuild Memorial Prep, which is a middle school in Logan Heights, which has had quite a few problems over the years,” Koran said.
Those problems include low performance, under-enrollment and parents busing their kids to higher performing schools outside the neighborhood.
“We’ve really had too many families that believe that for their students to get a quality education, they’ve got to put their kids on a bus and leave the neighborhood,” Barrera said.
The money for the renovations will come from Props. S and Z -- $4.9 billion worth of voter-approved school construction bonds passed in 2008 and 2012. Barrera said because the project was approved by voters in the Prop Z bond measure, no public vote or official board meeting has addressed the construction of the new school.
“It doesn’t require a board vote to direct staff to go through the community input process,” Barrera said.
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Construction will likely mean two other schools, which operate on the same campus as Memorial Prep, will have to relocate or close. Students at Logan K-8 and King-Chavez Elementary Charter School will likely be displaced during the renovations, Koran reported.
Barrera said the renovations will give the school a fresh start.
“What we’re doing is we’re going to do a complete rebuild of the middle school, and then we’re also going to locate a small high school on the same campus,” Barrera said. “The goal would be to connect the students in the middle school and the high school to careers pathways, which could be in high tech; it could be in health care, could be in the green economy.”
It’s not the first time we’ve seen district officials try this approach.
In 2007, educators and district officials had similar aspirations for the brand-new state-of-the-art Lincoln High, which had a $129 million price tag. That investment hasn’t exactly paid off yet the way district officials envisioned.
“We saw something similar with what happened to Lincoln High School,” Koran said. “Around 2007, that school was rebuilt and reopen. But since it was reopened, it’s never really been able to get on its feet. It’s struggled academically. It’s still severely under-enrolled. There are huge portions of the school that are just sort of vacant.”
Barrera said it’s not necessarily true the Lincoln High rebuild was a failure.
“First of all, let’s understand than Lincoln is now starting to grow because they’ve created an attractive program that links high school students with the community colleges and does focus on career pathways.”
Barrera said the plan is to involve the entire community in the planning process for the new school.
“If the community is involved in helping design what the school is going to look like, and if we’re able to bring the families a real sense of opportunities for kids that we can prepare them for the future, we think it’s going to become a very attractive option, and families are going to want to stay in the neighborhood,” Barrera said.
