Santa Paula High School Gets New Look

Los Angeles Times
January 5, 1995

The following is a story from the January 5, 1995 Issue of the Los Angeles Times describing the school’s last expansion. During this period the “400” and Agriculture buildings were constructed and improvements were made to existing classrooms. This article is especially interesting as Santa Paula High School is again planning to build a new (presumably named) two story “500” building and improve the football field with new bond money.

Santa Paula Union High School officials turned $5 million of borrowed money into nearly $8 million cash and now have a new band room, cafeteria, student store and 15-room humanities building to show for it.

“The humanities building is the absolute gem,” Principal Sandra Barbier said as students Wednesday settled into the new building for the first time.

But the bond money cannot bail out the school’s swimming pool, which will close in May without more cash to operate.

Santa Paula residents five years ago overwhelmingly passed a $5-million bond measure earmarked for campus improvements at Santa Paula Union High School, which many see as a strong, common bond in this low-income, mostly rural community of 26,000.

School officials in turn used that money to tap another $3 million in matching grants from the state, district Supt. Robert Fisher said. The money has enabled officials to make badly needed repairs and move students out of portable classrooms that the stately but decaying campus has used for years.

The $8-million, five-year construction project has been the sole source of good financial news for school officials, who have laid off seven employees this school year and are struggling to keep open the swimming pool on the 1,200-student campus.

Fisher said $30,000 per year is needed to operate the pool. And unless an outside funding source is found by May, school officials will pour sand into Santa Paula’s only public swimming pool.

The $8 million was also used to remove asbestos, repair inadequate lighting and plumbing and fix drooping ceilings and cracked walls. Officials hope to raze a warehouse and erect a new agriculture building by the summer of 1996.

But the centerpiece of the renovations is the three-story humanities building erected atop a parking lot and connected to the administration building by a covered footbridge. The building will house English, foreign language and social science classes, as well as the school yearbook office.

“I just feel it is too good of a school to let it go to pot,” said 1971 graduate Scott Rushing, 41, who helped organize the bond campaign. “Our roots run deep in Santa Paula.”

Indeed they do.

Several Santa Paula government officials, including 70-year-old Mayor Alfonso C. Urias and four of the five school board members, attended Santa Paula High School.

“A lot of people in Santa Paula went through the school system here,” school trustee Bb Gonzalez said. “There are a lot of fond memories at the high school.”

Gonzalez graduated in 1968 and now serves as a commander in the Santa Paula Police Department.

In 1939, most of the current school buildings were built for $329,000 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The school has tiled roofs, arched hallways and red brick hallways. Its 350 seat auditorium with balcony is decorated with murals but – like the rest of the campus – still needs repair.

The two gymnasiums need nearly $1 million in renovations as algae forms in the swimming pool, which officials cannot afford to maintain.

But the high school – in one form or another – has stood at its North 6th Street site since 1891. Four plaques honoring alumni killed in four wars grace the school’s hallways. The Ventura County Historical Society has designated the school a historical landmark.

“There is a real sense of respect for this school that you won’t find at others,” Barbier said. “The students treat it with a little more reverence.”

While peeling paint is still visible in the hallways and some cracks still line walls, the hilly campus is mostly free of graffiti and vandalism typically found at high schools.

The students, however, are typical in one regard:

“It’s still school,” Sean Lyons, 14, said when asked about the new buildings, where he attends world geography class. “It’s still geography.”