Every day, thousands of Berkeley High School students push through crowded hallways to get to their classes. With a 500,000 square foot campus, many classrooms and hallways are overcrowded when they shouldn’t have to be. Along with other factors, the need for a staff parking lot ultimately led to BHS deciding to move the softball field and, in its place, create a new building dedicated to Career Technical Education (CTE). Despite the cost, the new addition of a CTE building is worth the investment as it will help support the robotics program, give more resources to CTE classes, and make the most out of the space on campus.
The CTE department at BHS houses classes such as Digital Sound Engineering, CAD Design Studio, Law and Social Justice, Biotech, Bio Health Science, and more. The CTE department was originally named Vocational Education, and it helped train students for jobs after high school. Currently, most CTE classes also function as college preparatory classes, allowing students to use them to fulfill various college requirements. Around 2,000 students at BHS are enrolled in a CTE class, so these classes are currently held in almost every building. The newly built S building will house Robotics Engineering, a Machine Shop, several new BHS classrooms, counselor offices, student restrooms, and a conference room. Four tennis courts and a parking lot for staff will also be built.
This will be a big project for the Berkeley Unified School District, costing around $15 million to build. In March 2020, BUSD passed $300 million in bonds for facilities and maintenance, with 10 million over 10 years going to the CTE department. The funding for this building will be coming from the facilities bond, as well as the CTE budget.
The robotics program, which is part of the CTE department, has made immense progress since it was first founded in 2015. It was first funded by the University of California Berkeley Chancellor's Community Partnership Fund and created a small team with less than ten students. Since then, the program has expanded considerably to around 80 members last season. The program allows both beginning and advanced students to thrive, especially with the creation of a new junior varsity team this year.
It is difficult to fit the projects and machines necessary into the current robotics space. The space wasn’t intended to be for robotics, and with the hallways and regular door frames, the robotics team struggles to fit large equipment in the rooms. There also is not enough power capability in the space, as some machinery requires more power than the current room can provide.
“If you come in here during robotics team meetings, although we do have two full classrooms and other small side rooms, you put 80 people in that space and they're trying to build robots, it gets loud, it gets chaotic,” said Dirk Wright, an engineering teacher at BHS, “People are working on top of each other, and part of the S building is designed to optimize and separate the drilling and grinding from the computer programming from the CAD design and try to create it in such a way that there's going to be great workspaces where all the different elements of what students want to pursue in the space of their lives.”
During robotics competitions, teams compete with their robots on a large field, around the size of a basketball court. Currently, it is difficult for the BHS robotics team to test out their robots, as the size of the room is not nearly big enough for the two robots. The location of the S building will be helpful with moving robotics equipment, as most robotics competitions hosted by BHS are held in the M gym.
The proposed new space in the S building would enable more advanced manufacturing capabilities compared to the current space. The addition of advanced machinery will allow students to familiarize themselves with new equipment and skills for the future. This additional machinery would not only benefit the robotics team but also could be used by other clubs and classes at BHS and potentially even allow more engineering focused classes to be formed at BHS. “All the (new) storage spaces and workspaces have been designed to allow students to function in an engineering and manufacturing environment that's much more like the real world,” Wright said, “Ultimately, we hope that students, by working in those spaces, can gain the confidence to go out, walk into a shop, and be like, yes, you could hire me. Yes, I've seen equipment that looks like the equipment you have here. I've worked in environments that look like this.”
The parking spaces will also greatly help the BHS staff. Currently, many of the staff use the parking lot by the M gate, which is not large enough for the 208 people on staff. Other alternatives to the parking lot include public transportation and garage parking. Unfortunately, garage parking in Berkeley tends to be quite expensive. For example, the garage located at 2020 Kittredge Street has reserved monthly parking for $210. By building a new parking lot, BHS staff will be able to spend less time worrying about and finding parking.
A new conference room will also be added to the building, which will take a lot of strain off of the single conference that BHS has for all of its staff. This long-demanded addition to BHS will aid staff connectivity, provide a meeting space for BHS teachers, and create a more cohesive BHS community overall.
Before the 2000s, BHS had tennis courts on its campus, which was eventually replaced by the E building. The BHS tennis teams currently practice at the Hearst courts on the UC Berkeley campus. Unfortunately, UC Berkeley plans to take down almost all tennis courts on their campus to create more parking. The new tennis courts on the BHS campus will allow the boys and girls tennis teams to have somewhere to practice. The new stands that will be built will hopefully increase audiences at games, as they won’t need to hike up Bancroft to see the matches.
Overall, this new project will improve BHS in a myriad of ways. From providing students with more opportunities to gain experience in fields like robotics to allocating more accessible parking to staff, the construction of the new S building will have benefits that will aid many future generations of BHS students to come. By making improvements like these, BHS will become an even more accomplished school and ensure students are prepared to succeed in a world beyond academia.
DISCLAIMER: the Jacket is a CTE class.