WOODLAND — As far back as Woodland High School’s longtime principal can remember, the small campus has hardly had enough room for its students.
By the time Principal John Shoup joined the staff in 1998, Woodland High School had already added several portable classrooms to accommodate a student population that would continue to grow. The school was built for just 350 students, and 60 years after the campus opened, it houses nearly twice that many.
That won’t be a problem much longer, though, as construction is on schedule for a new school more than twice as large as the current one. Set to open next fall, the school is located west of Interstate 5 on Dike Access Road, sandwiched between Walmart to the east and three new fields for football, baseball and softball to the west.
The 156,000-square-foot school will have classroom capacity for about 900 students, Shoup said. And with space on the 41-acre site to build another wing, the school could eventually have room for as many as 1,200.
“I will have long since retired by the time that there’s a need to expand,” Shoup said.
Crews broke ground last year on the roughly $43 million construction project, one of the largest in Woodland’s history. The new school is designed to accommodate the growing student population for at least another half-century, Superintendent Michael Green said.
It’s also a more secure campus, Green said. As a single building with fewer entrances, students will no longer need to walk outside to portables or other wings of the building to get from one class to the next.
The increased security should help keep unwanted visitors off campus, Green added.
Bigger parking lot
Construction should wrap up in mid-July, said Trevor Wyckoff, a project manager for Skanska, the prime contractor. While it isn’t one of the biggest schools Wyckoff has worked on, the spacious two-story building towers over anything else in the Woodland School District.
Some of the school’s larger spaces, including the gymnasium, are already designed to house up to 1,200 people at a time. The new building also has a number of open gathering spaces, something you won’t find in the old high school, Green said.
“If you walk through our high school, you oftentimes at lunchtime see kids in the hallways sitting on the floor against lockers, because there is not enough room in the cafeteria to eat,” he said. “One of the design elements of this new high school is there are places intentionally designed for kids to have hangout spots.”
Shoup is also excited to have a larger parking lot for his students and 10 times as many spaces for visitors. With limited parking on the old campus, students have little choice but to find parking along side streets in front of houses, and there are only two spots on campus designated for visitors, he said.
As the campus opens its doors, the old high school will be converted into the district’s new middle school for students in grades five through eight, Green said. Meanwhile, the rest of the district will also shuffle several grade levels around to different schools to give everyone a little more elbow room.
“Currently, all of our schools are very overcrowded,” Green said. “One of the more exciting things for me is that it frees up space for all of our kids.”
