Hollister
– There are certain things that teachers who work at rural
schools learn to live with – frogs living under the buildings, mice
in the ceiling and the occasional squirrel scurrying across the
back of a classroom. And the teachers at San Benito County’s Spring
Grove School just south of the Santa
Clara County line take instances such as these with good
humor.
One thing they don’t joke about, though, is the condition of
most of the school’s portable classrooms, some of which are sinking
into the earth and have broken windows and holes in the outside
walls.
Hollister – There are certain things that teachers who work at rural schools learn to live with – frogs living under the buildings, mice in the ceiling and the occasional squirrel scurrying across the back of a classroom. And the teachers at San Benito County’s Spring Grove School just south of the Santa Clara County line take instances such as these with good humor.
One thing they don’t joke about, though, is the condition of most of the school’s portable classrooms, some of which are sinking into the earth and have broken windows and holes in the outside walls.
“Every year it’s gotten a little worse,” said kindergarten teacher Julie Neff, who has been teaching at Spring Grove for nine years.
Two of the three doors in her classroom don’t open, when it rains the floor gets wet and last year a substitute teacher put her foot through the floor, she said.
Next month, Teachers and the school’s more than 500 students will leave the campus and it’s many dilapidated classrooms for summer break. When they return in fall they will be greeted by 16 brand-new buildings, thanks to the school’s modernization project, a plan four years in the works that is set to begin construction on June 13.
The $3 million renovation of the kindergarten through eighth grade school will be funded by a combination of state money, a $400,000 loan from San Benito Bank and funds raised by the school’s parent teacher organization.
“I think everyone is excited about it,” said Howard Chase, superintendent and principal. “The children will leave an old school and come back to a new school, with everything clean, new and fresh.”
Spring Grove consists of more than two dozen portable classrooms, many more than 30 years old, surrounded by trees and shrubbery. It is small, but has a computer lab, library, gym as well as basketball and volleyball courts and a baseball field. Some of the planned improvements include a new science wing, a new kindergarten classroom and renovated bathrooms – long-awaited projects the school simply didn’t have money for until now.
The renovation will finally begin June 13, when workers will be on campus tearing the old air conditioners off of the buildings being replaced, and then the old classrooms will be bulldozed to make way for the new structers.
“I’m looking forward to a healthy, clean new classroom – a new start,” Neff said. “It’s good for kids to feel like the place where their getting educated is important.”
