Roseland University Prep seeks money for new high school

About a decade ago, Roseland School District’s leaders built their first high school in the only space they could find: A large warehouse off Sebastopol Road that had previously served as a Sears repair building and a training center for migrant workers. But they never planned for it to be the school’s permanent home.

That’s why they recently launched a campaign to raise the final $1 million needed to begin building a bigger, permanent campus in the spring of 2016 and open it by the fall of 2017.

“I think from the beginning, we knew we wanted a permanent home for our students,” said Gail Andrade Ahlas, who retired as superintendent of Roseland School District this summer but has continued as a volunteer with the efforts to see the new school built.

“Our goal is to have that money by the end of 2015 with the help of the community.”

Andrade Ahlas was largely responsible for opening Roseland University Prep in 2004 with just 80 students. The goal was to have them all graduate having met the requirements to be accepted to a four-year state university.

Since then, the school’s enrollment has grown to about 450 students. About 90 percent are from low-income households; the majority are learning to speak English as their second language. Despite those challenges, all 2014 graduates were accepted to either a two-year or four-year college.

Susan Moore, founder of the Roseland Charter School Community Advisory Board, is helping lead the fundraising efforts for the new facility. She said the school has proven its merits over the years, garnering national acclaim by sending some of the county’s most disadvantaged children to college at high rates. She urged community members to support the new school, saying students and staff have earned it.

“The least we can do is provide these children a place where they have (access to) regular stuff,” she said. “Now, there’s no grass, no windows, no nothing. They’re just packed into classrooms. That isn’t good enough.”

Anthony Mendoza, a freshman at Roseland University Prep, has been enjoying his first year at the school.

“The teachers here actually help, they like and care about you, you get to meet a lot of new people, and the seniors don’t torture you,” he commented during lunch on Monday. However, he said, he’s less a fan of the building itself.

“It’s too small,” he said. “It would be nice to have bigger classrooms without leaks.

The growing enrollment has tested the facility’s capacity, requiring teachers to share cramped classrooms and students to crowd inside the school’s multi-purpose room for lunch on rainy days and even spill over into nearby classrooms.

On Monday, as rain drove inside the students who would normally eat outdoors, the multi-purpose room affectionately called “the big room” bustled with students jostling for space.

Mendoza and his friends couldn’t find a table, so they ate lunch standing near a wall. Close by, a couple buckets caught leaking rainwater.

Over the years, RUP outgrew its main 20,000-square-foot warehouse space, forcing it to expand to an additional building space to provide enough classrooms. But last spring, a fire marshal found numerous safety issues with the added space and urged them to vacate it “without delay.”

To address the safety concerns, the school brought in about 3,000 square feet of portable classrooms and is no longer using the second building.

Right now, students have neither a gym nor a single grassy field at Roseland University Prep, Roseland Superintendent Amy Jones-Kerr said. They hold P.E. class in a converted parking lot when the weather is good and in a portable when it’s not.

The new plans call for a roughly 30,000-square-foot school with an additional 4,000 square feet in modular units to be built on a nearly 2-acre parcel at 1777 West. Ave., said Principal Sue Reese. That’s about a mile from the current campus, near two other Roseland schools.

High school students would share an existing athletic field and gym with elementary and junior high school students.

Over the last five years, Roseland leaders have been piecing together funds for the new school. About $7 million comes from a state grant, which the district is matching by taking out a $7 million loan from the California School Finance Authority. In August, the school received a $1 million grant from the Ruth W. Finley Foundation. That put it within a million of the total construction cost.

The school itself will be a two-story building with new science labs, a courtyard, a library and 17 classrooms, enough for each teacher to have his or her own space.

“Having a new building for our students will be amazing,” Reese said, though she added, “In some ways we’ll miss our purple warehouse. It’s an intimate feeling.”

For that reason, officials plan to replicate certain elements from the current facility, including the purple color scheme and the Big Room students have come to love for assemblies and after-school gatherings.

Seniors said they have grown fond of their campus, despite students from other schools sometimes giving them a hard time about “going to school in a warehouse.”

The location “doesn’t define the school,” said Senior Jennifer Garcia, adding that the small, quirky space has brought the student body together “like a family.”

“The only bad thing about this school is the small space and hallways,” she said. Once the school has its new home, she predicted, “Everyone will want to go here.”

Staff Writer Jamie Hansen ?blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach her at 521-5205 ?or jamie.hansen@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@jamiehansen.