The school board has rejected two sites for a fifth high school in Moreno Valley and will start looking for a less expensive alternative.

One popular idea is to explore converting a vacant Home Base building into a school at The Festival shopping center on Hemlock Avenue.

Among the other possibilities are a virtual high school with more online learning in a partnership with Riverside Unified, moving sixth-graders back to elementary schools to free a middle school for 1,200 high school students, finding smaller sites for magnet schools devoted to the arts or sciences or changing boundaries.

The trustees voted 4-1 Tuesday night to scuttle both proposed sites north of Highway 60, each of which would have cost at least $100 million or more.

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Other possibilities the board may brainstorm could include starting a virtual high school with more online learning in a partnership with Riverside Unified, moving sixth-graders back to elementary schools to free up a middle school for 1,200 high school students, changing boundaries, finding smaller sites for a magnet school devoted to the arts or sciences.

Vackar said she doubts that schools of the future will be clones of the four high schools in the community, especially with the growing emphasis on allied health sciences and technology.

School board president Rick Sayre said the challenge is incorporating contemporary teaching tools into traditional high school models that still offer all kinds of sports.

At Tuesday night’s public hearing, site 2 was still the more popular among residents, but there was a growing number of supporters for site 1 or a new location. ?

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Kaweah, EUHS Virtual High School and the EUHSD Community Day School would still reside just east of the transportation and maintenance yards. Opportunity program students would share the EUHS campus in a self-contained setting. The move would allow for both the expansion of the opportunity program and the virtual high school.

“We’ve been looking for an alternative delivery as well as a location for awhile,” said Superintendent Renee Whitson.

The opportunity program is now technically outside the city limits, meaning Tulare County Sheriff has to respond if a call is made. The move to the EUHS campus would mean that Exeter Police Department’s campus officer could respond immediately.

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High school students with hectic schedules will soon be able to more easily incorporate regular classes into their agendas, as the Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) is planning to set in place what guidance counselor Karine Turdjian describes as a “virtual high school.”

According to an information report sent to the Board of Education from superintendent Richard M. Sheehan, the district is looking into the administration of online courses. The task could be approached in two ways, depending on who would be creating the classes. One option would be to have them formed by GUSD teachers; the other option would feature classes made by an outside agency. GUSD instructors would conduct the classes regardless of the developers.

According to Turdjian, teachers and principals started planning for the online program this year.
Physical education teacher Judy Thomsen has had the idea for an online program for a while, and even mentioned it during her interview for a teaching position at Clark several years ago. “One of the main reasons I came to Clark was for the technology; you learn how to implement it in an educational environment,” she says.

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