What a Site

Project Team Overcomes High School's Hilly, Compact Location

By Greg Aragon

In 60 days, when many schools are preparing to close their doors for summer vacation, the portal of San Marcos' new $53 million Mission Hills High School is scheduled to open for the first time.

The 275,000-sq.-ft. learning center-the city's second high school-will welcome administrators and faculty a couple of months before students arrive in late August. The new school will gradually siphon off the overcrowded population from San Marcos High, which currently is packed with an enrollment of 3,200, about 700 over the ideal capacity.

The project, which broke ground on March 1, 2002, is currently in the punch-list stage, and construction crews are wrapping up the installation of the athletic field's artificial turf.

Topographical issues were at the top of the tough-task list for the school's design and construction team.

"Fitting a comprehensive, 2,400-student high school onto a 42-acre site is extremely complicated," said Jon Baker, president and CEO of the project architect, Glendora-based NTD. "Schools this big are usually built on at least 65 acres."

To overcome the tight site, Baker said the school was designed with the buildings terraced into the north San Diego County hillside.

"The key was developing different pad elevations that allow good circulation flow as well ADA compliance," Baker said. "Even though it's a complicated hillside site, we still have to meet [ADA] requirements and try to avoid making the campus look like a nursing home with ramps and rails everyplace."

In a major effort to make the site fit for construction, San Marcos-based Lusardi Construction Co., the general contractor, built a 40,000-sq.-ft. modular retaining wall and blasted approximately 400,000 cu. yds. of rock to create the school's building pads.

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Jeff Jenco, a Lusardi vice president, said the hilly site's 70-ft. elevation variance created difficulties regarding ADA requirements for maximum slope for sidewalks and building separations.

Jenco, whose company moved 1 million cu. yds. of soil during construction, said crews solved the slope problem by "selectively grading the project and creating a hole where we could bury large rocks generated from the blasting.

"We used retaining walls to create specific pad elevations that could be graded and held consistent, then used the athletic fields as our balance, because they could be raised or lowered to allow for the variance that we incurred due to footings, utility and trenching spoils."

Good Until the Cows Come Home

Besides campus size and slope, the school's location was also cause for concern: it was built on the pasture area of an old dairy farm.

Thom Clark, director of facilities for San Marcos Unified School District, said that obtaining approvals from the state department of toxic substance control wasn't a piece of cake.

"We had to go through a 'preliminary danger agreement' and it took about an extra year out of our schedule" to process the paperwork affirming that the site was safe to build on, he said. "We had to prove through soil testing that there weren't any hidden methane issues."

When complete, Mission Hills High School will feature 11 two-story buildings, a quadrangle and parking for up to 1,200 cars. It will include a 2,600-seat football stadium with concrete bleachers, synthetic turf field, rubber track and full support amenities; gymnasium; baseball and softball fields; two soccer fields; 10 outdoor basketball courts; and 10 outdoor tennis courts.

Lusardi also installed three traffic signals in front of the school.

In the fall, Mission Hills High will welcome about 1,200 ninth-, 10th-, and 11th-graders. It will grow to about 1,600 students when seniors are added in the 2005-06 school year.