New Sierra Madre Middle School to Break Ground in December

The proposed $32 million Sierra Madre middle school will begin construction in December this year after the city’s chief architect approved the Facilities Master Plan, Sierra Madre Middle School Planning Principal Garret Newsom told Pasadena Now in an exclusive interview. The project is expected to be completed within two years.

“I’m very excited because the plan for new middle school campus was approved by the [city] chief architect. And we are now moving forward with the construction process. Many of the contractors have been pre-approved so we expect the bidding process to be speed up. We are scheduled December,” Newsom said.

The Sierra Madre community has been hoping for the construction of its middle school campus because the city has no building for its seventh and eight graders.

In June, the preliminary FMC for the proposed campus was presented to the Pasadena Unified School District officials for review. The plan included 22 classrooms, two science laboratories,  computer laboratory, a library, and a gymnasium.

Newsom added that all the laboratories, library and gymnasium would be state-of-the-art. Aside from those facilities, the new campus will have a multi-purpose room and an outdoor ampi theatre that will allow the school to hold separate lessons.

The plan also allocates a separate $4.7 million for the upgrade of the Sierra Madre Elementary School as well as a pre-kindergarten building and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) upgrades to the auditorium and classrooms, including a new staff parking lot.

With 375 students currently enrolled in the campus, Newsom said the construction of the new building would give the school the opportunity to push for a comprehensive middle school program.

“The options presented to us were either to renovate the old campus or tear it down and build a brand new school. But after careful studies and analysis, they [PUSD] have found that it was cheaper to build a new will school than to renovate. So that is the approach that they took and now we will have a new state-of-the-art facility,” he added.

Asked to comment on the impact of the construction particularly the expected noise coming from the site, Newsom allayed this fears and added the project manager of the middle school building has taken much effort to lessen the construction’s impact.

“Of course that is a challenge,” Newsom said, but he described the building’s project manager Frazer Thompson as “an outstanding project manager” who has an extensive experience building school. “They [contractors] obviously will be able to address those issues. They are expert in working around that term. So there will be no distraction that will affect the community,” Newsom assured.

He also thanked the PUSD for investing in the school construction and for investing in the  education of Sierra Madre’s children. He said that the Sierra Madre community is grateful that it would now have two new state-of-the-art facilities. .One is the elementary campus and a few miles away will be the “beautiful middle school campus.”

“One of the many surprises I’ve seen regarding this project is the resolve of the Sierra Madre community and how we come together to make sure that our students will have what they need. The parents, teachers, students, staff and community members [of Sierra Madre] all worked together to face the different obstacles that we faced for this project. Any challenge that we faced made us stronger as a community and we worked together to find a solution for all these challengers. We made it right for our children so we can continue to offer a more comprehensive [school] program at this challenging time,” he said.

Amongt the many challenges faced by Sierra Madre was the 20 percent budget cut introduced into the PUSD budget that resulted to the shortage of Measure TT funding “due to the lack of anticipated state, local and grant matching funds.”

It was earlier feared that the construction of the middle school will not break ground because of lack of funding.