Construction News

Tom Jacoubowsky

Over the past few months we have had a lot of news on the construction front. While the school year has recently started, our construction is in full swing as the work of Measure A can clearly be seen.

The new Career Tech Ed building, formerly known as the Industrial Art building, is still on schedule for an end of November finish. The sorely outdated building was completely gutted and will be a state of the art facility for our Auto, Engineering Tech, Video Production, Bio Tech and our new Project Lead the Way Class (PLTW). PLTW is a new course offering for 2009-2010 that introduces students to engineering. The course, taught by Bakari Holmes, is open to students of all grade levels and it will help serve as a bridge to give 9^th and 10^th graders an engineering option where they previously had none.

On the athletic front our swimming pool was opened at the beginning of the summer and has been steadily used by our aquatics program. In the next couple of months the shade structures will be installed which mark the official completion of the pool as Gunn will have one of the finest aquatic facilities in the area.

Last month our all weather track was redone. After nearly 10 years, the old one was showing wear and tear and the new one is a welcome addition and represents the final part of the entire renovation of the main athletic field. Over the last three years the area has seen the installation of lights, a new stadium, a synthetic playing turf field and now a new synthetic track.
Finally, many of you have noticed the improved striping of the entrance of the parking lot. The entire front area has been repaved and the fresh striping has made it much easier to navigate our parking lot. As many of you know, our entrance was changed last year at the request of the city of Palo Alto to see if it could help get people into the Gunn parking lot more efficiently. The city has approved the reduction of lanes of Arastradero for the summer of 2010 and it was vital that Gunn parking lot traffic wasn’t backed up to Arastradero. The new parking lot design last year was successful in preventing cars from queuing back to Arastradero and the hope is that this will allow the city to go ahead with its plan to create traffic calming measures on Arastradero.