San Carlos elementary schools’ plans are thrown off again with the construction delays of Charter Learning Center and Mariposa Upper Elementary.
The San Carlos School District plans to create a new campus for Charter Learning Center after sharing a campus with Tierra Linda Middle School for 17 years.
The district implemented a fourth-through-fifth-grade school system known as an upper elementary school after the completion of the new Central Middle School campus. The first upper elementary school was Arroyo, which moved into the old Central classrooms. The second upper elementary school will be Mariposa.
Mariposa currently operates on the three campuses of Heather Elementary, Arundel Elementary, and Tierra Linda Middle School. This means that the fourth graders attending Heather and Arundel, along with the fifth graders at Tierra Linda, are all technically students of Mariposa.
Once the new Charter Learning Center campus is completed, all of Mariposa will move into Charter’s old classrooms to become a unified campus.
However, this has been delayed until past the 2018-19 school year.
Originally, construction was to be complete by the start of the 2017-18 school year; however, numerous delays have slowed the process, beginning with the delay announced in March of 2017.
A newsletter sent out by the San Carlos School District regarding the delay announced on March 10 said “We expect the Mariposa renovations, the TL [Tierra Linda] modernization, the TL learning commons, and the CLC [Charter Learning Center] multi-use room to be complete by Aug. 22, 2017 for the opening of the 2017-2018 school year. We now expect the GrowthPoint Classrooms for CLC, however, to be delayed until December 2017.”
Initially, the fourth grade was to be relocated from the Arundel and Heather campuses by the start of the 2017-18 school year. However, due to the initial construction delay, the fourth grade was required to remain through the school year.
A statement was released on Oct. 23 by the San Carlos School District with news of a further delay. “Regretfully, key delivery dates have been missed and we do not believe CLC will be able to move over the Presidents’ Week Break into its new buildings. Therefore, the Mariposa modernization will not be completed for the opening of the 2018-19 school year.”
Regardless of the delays, Pamela Jasso, Principal of Heather Elementary School, said “Although we had spent the year planning ways to use our campus differently, moving from a K-4 to P-3 school, we’ve had fourth grade at our school forever and so we recognized it would be business as usual.”
However, as a result of the fourth grade’s stay at Heather, the campus doesn’t have enough space to accommodate all classes.
“We currently are stressed for space for support classes such as O.T. and speech and have had to get creative in using other spaces,” said Jasso.
The San Carlos School District has said that they plan to hold community meetings to discuss the delays and get community feedback.
“We’re going to make lemonade out of lemons,” said Jasso.
Bill • Nov 8, 2017 at 9:42 am
…and amazingly, San Carlos voters, yesterday, elected to retain the two incumbent school board members (Carol Elliott & Kathleen Farley) that were on the ballot, demonstrating the ignorance that elected Donald Trump president is alive and well in “The City of Good Living.”
It should come as no surprise that all San Carlos school board members (as well as former Superintendent Craig Baker, COO Robert Porter & Interim Asst Superintendent Allison Liner) live in areas of the city zoned for the other 4/5 school, Arroyo, which was completed over budget but On Time.