Hawthorne Press Tribune The Weekly Newspaper of Hawthorne Herald Publications - Inglewood, Hawthorne, Lawndale, El Segundo, Torrance & Manhattan Beach Community Newspapers Since 1911 - Circulation 30,000 - Readership 60,000 (310) 322-1830 - May 14, 2015 Inside This Issue Certified & Licensed Professionals.......................3 Classifieds............................3 Community Briefs...............3 Finance..................................2 Food.......................................8 Hawthorne Happenings....3 Legals............................2, 6-7 Pets........................................4 Police Reports.....................7 Sports....................................5 Weekend Forecast Friday Showers 63˚/56˚ Saturday Partly Cloudy 64˚/55˚ Sunday Sunny 69˚/57˚ Racers Run for Health at Hawthorne 5K Top three finishers for the male and female divisions, along with race officials, pose with medals after Saturday’s Healthy Hawthorne Five-Kilometer Run. The race was held in conjunction with the Hawthorne Health Fair. See story, page 5. Photo by Joe Snyder. Wiseburn Continues Moving Forward With New High School Project By Cristian Vasquez School, has earned the confidence of Wiseburn During the most recent Wiseburn School administrators who are excited to move forward Board meeting on April 30, the board approved with the next step of the project. the contractor for the new high school: Balfour “We also have the clearance from the State in Beatty Construction. Balfour Beatty has been terms of the Environmental Impact Report and involved with several school construction the Department of Toxic Substances Control,” projects throughout the South Bay, primarily Dr. Johnstone said. “We have cleared all the in Torrance and at Redondo Beach Union hurdles and we also have a final agreement High School. with the City of El Segundo with the aquatic “They were [the best bid] and we have center.” been working with them for the last couple The shared agreement will be between of years,” Wiseburn Superintendent Dr. Tom Johnstone said. “We have been working with Gensler Architects, they are an international architect firm with a strong presence in the Los Angeles area but they are in Europe, Africa and in Asia. They are a very well respected firm.” This brings the small and academically successful district one step closer to breaking ground on the high school it has worked arduously and diligently to open. The school, which will call 201 N. Douglas St. home, will consist of the three separate Da Vinci schools, Design, Science and Communications, with each school being assigned its own floor. Contractors are tasked to convert the once office building into a fully-functional high school while complying with the stringent State requirements for seismic safety. “The plans were submitted to the division of the state architect last June 21, 2014. Those are just coming out now and we have already gotten approval on structural, which was a big obstacle since that building was built in 1981 as a commercial building and we are converting it to a school,” Dr. Johnstone said. “Schools and hospitals are the safest buildings in the state and that is costing eight to eleven million dollars just to do the seismic retrofitting but we got approval on that.” Balfour Beatty, who also built the Brann Center over at Peter Burnett Elementary El Segundo Parks and Recs and Wiseburn Unified School District will allow Wiseburn High School students to access one of the finest aquatic facilities in Southern California with a 54-meter pool with a warm-up pool next to it. The Wiseburn School District is still waiting on minor modifications regarding fire line safety. While such requirements are normally not difficult to fulfill for a one-story building, the schematics are more complex for a four-story building. “That one is taking a bit longer but these are state requirements. We hope to have all that by mid June and we hope to start construction by mid August, later this summer,” Dr. Johnstone said. The Wiseburn School District has undertaken several school construction projects in the past 13 years, including having rebuilt Anza Elementary School, Cabrillo Elementary School, Dana Middle School and the new construction and modernization efforts at Peter Burnett Elementary. All of those projects were funded with bond money and state matching funds. The projects together cost an estimated $80 million for which the district received about $16 million in state matching funds. “We always had this expectation back in 2010, when we passed the high school bond for $87 million, that were going to get more matching funds,” Dr. Johnstone said. “We purchased the property at 201 Douglas in El Segundo and the property itself was $46 million so that ate up more than half of the [bond] money, so we were going to be very dependent on State matching funds.” However, when the district applied for state matching funds the state hadn’t passed a school facility bond since 2006 so the money for school districts ran out in 2013. “The money we received for Peter Burnett was actually the last pool of money distributed,” Dr. Johnstone said. “We were blessed that there was a pool of money, $89.9 million, that was charter school money so the Wiseburn Unified School District gave their eligibility to the Da Vinci Schools and the Da Vinci Schools applied for that; it was almost a miracle. Of the $89.9, we received $52.7.” Not having to wait for state matching funds allowed the district to avoid incurring additional expenditures due to the yearly increases in construction costs. The district is now locked into current costs, which will be covered by the bond money and state matching funds already obtained. “State matching funds, which we always knew we would get, are important because the State may not pass another bond until 2016 or 2018 and we would have had to wait,” Dr. Johnstone said. “In this case we don’t have to wait and we can start our project on time and on budget.” • “Schools and hospitals are the safest buildings in the state and that is costing eight to eleven million dollars just to do the seismic retrofitting but we got approval on that.”
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