Elementary students will share space with middle schoolers while
a new east side school is built
By Lori Stuenkel
GILROY – Eliot Elementary School students will find a temporary home at the newly completed Ascencion Solorsano Middle School while their school is destroyed and rebuilt.
Eliot’s 390 kindergarten through fifth-grade students will be housed at Solorsano, outnumbering the 210 sixth-graders who will also attend the school. The new Eliot facility is expected to be complete by August 2005.
With the start of school days away, the move from Eliot’s Seventh Street site to Gilroy’s new middle school off Santa Teresa Boulevard is nearly complete.
“Pretty much everything looks ready,” Eliot Principal Diane Elia said. “We still have a little shifting left to do. (The teachers) have been working furiously, much of it on their own time, trying to get their classrooms ready.”
However, problems might arise once school starts. Moving Eliot to a site miles away might pose a difficulty for some parents who are used to walking their students to school, Elia said.
The district created a new bus route that will take children to and from the old Eliot school site each day. Parents who choose to drive their children to Solorsano will be able to use the drop-off and pick-up area by turning onto Club Drive from Santa Teresa Boulevard, where there is a stoplight.
Eliot parent Elizabeth Nelsen is not worried that her daughter, set to enter fifth-grade, would be disrupted by the move.
“I don’t think she’ll have that much contact with (the Solorsano students),” Nelsen said. “Besides, they’re just sixth-graders.”
Nelsen said she will drive her daughter to school .
Not much will be shared between the two schools except some members of the front office staff, said Sal Tomasello, principal of Solorsano and assistant principal of South Valley Middle School.
Although the elementary and middle school will start and end each day at about the same time, two separate bell schedules will regulate students’ release times.
Eliot’s classrooms will be in three buildings on the Solorsano campus, with sixth-graders in the remaining two. Because the classrooms were built for a middle school, a few of those used by elementary students will be future home economics or science classrooms.
“They will have all the functions of a normal classroom, with maybe some extra stuff like microwaves and sinks in them,” said Charlie Van Meter, director of facilities and maintenance operations for GUSD.
Outside the classrooms, students from the two schools will have little contact. A recreational area only for Eliot students contains playground equipment brought over from the old site. There is one cafeteria, but with the schools’ separate lunch schedules they will not be eating together. The cafeteria’s kitchen facility will offer Eliot students something they have never had before – freshly prepared hot lunches.
“All the kids kept asking me … ‘Are we going to have a kitchen, too?’ ” Van Meter said. “They’re very excited about it.”
Hot lunches used to be delivered to Eliot because the school had no on-site food service.
Other special features at the $26.5-million Solorsano campus, such as the multipurpose room, gymnasium and modern bathrooms will be available to Eliot students as well. The middle school’s library will have a special section of Eliot’s age-appropriate books.
Finishing touches on the construction of Solorsano – completed on time and on budget – did not hinder Eliot’s move, although some of the technical systems might not be ready until Monday, Tomasello said. Computers will be put in two separate labs this week, and the schools’ televisions, VCRs and DVD players will be installed.
“It was a very well-planned move,” Van Meter said. “It’s like night and day; it will be a brand new school.”
A moving company hired by GUSD brought the playground equipment, staff and teacher supplies, library contents and furniture to the temporary Eliot site.
Smaller-sized desks and chairs are needed for children in grades kindergarten through second. Grades three through five will use the larger middle school furniture.
“We might have some children sitting on phone books or … feet dangling above the floor,” Elia said. “But we’ll adjust.”
Solorsano’s larger campus will take some adjusting to, as well, Elia said. Neither the school yard staff nor the students are used to such a large playground area, so new rules will be created to keep children in their designated area.
Accommodations at Solorsano may feel a bit smaller in 2004 with the addition of a new sixth-grade class of about 250 students, but there will still be adequate room for everyone, Van Meter said. When the third sixth-grade class enters Solorsano in 2005 the school will hold about 850 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students.
As part of GUSD’s 25-year Facilities Master Plan, the Eliot site will be demolished and rebuilt as the district’s only two-story building. The two-year project will increase capacity on the limited space by 150 percent and keep an elementary school on the east side of town. The new facility’s capacity of 610 students will be smaller than the district standard of 750 for elementary schools.
The current site will be razed early next year once the building plans, still being finalized, are approved by the state architect and a construction company is awarded the job contract.
