BUSD board to visit Gird Road site, Sullivan MS

The Bonsall Unified School District board will hold what is officially a special meeting Aug. 1 for the purpose of visiting the Gird Road property and Sullivan Middle School.

The BUSD board will convene at 6 p.m. at the Bonsall Community Center and will then travel to the Gird Road property and to Sullivan. The board members all expressed support for the workshop at the district’s July 11 board meeting.

“It’s more of a board workshop than a special meeting,” said BUSD superintendent Justin Cunningham.

Due to the Brown Act, a noticed public meeting is required if a majority of board members are present at the same time and are discussing district business. No action is expected to be taken Aug. 1, but the district business visit will give board members a visual explanation of some of the facilities locations. “It’s pretty much just to make everybody familiar with what it is we’re talking about,” Cunningham said.

In November 2012, the voters of the Fallbrook Union High School District approved changing the K-8 Bonsall Union School District to a K-12 Bonsall Unified School District and removing that area from the Fallbrook Union High School District. The Bonsall Unified School District will initially use Sullivan Middle School for its high school campus; the high school will open with ninth-grade students only for 2014-15 and will expand by a grade a year until it has all four grades for 2017-18.

In 1967, the Fallbrook Union High School District acquired 50 acres off of Gird Road. The plan was to build a second high school in the district once enrollment reached 1,800 students, but the high school district never constructed the second school.

In December 2011, the high school board deemed the Gird Road property to be surplus, or not necessary for the district’s current or future needs. Had the unification vote failed, the high school district would likely have sold the property. Under the state’s Education Code, however, a school district reorganization automatically transfers real property to the location’s new district. The Gird Road property is thus available to the Bonsall Unified School District for a potential future school.

“We’ve been talking about it so much, and some of them have never been on the property,” Cunningham said.

The BUSD board’s May 9 meeting included conceptual approval of a facilities plan which will cover both the new high school and the future growth of the middle school due to additional population in the district. District staff estimated that between 50 and 100 ninth-graders will enroll at the high school during its first year. The current proposal is to utilize the seven classrooms on the eastern end of the Sullivan campus for ninth-grade students in 2014-15 while locating the sixth-grade students currently in those classrooms to five classrooms at the western end of the school.

The Aug. 1 workshop will include a visit to those classroom areas. “We can get everyone sort of a visual for how we plan to prepare that for the ninth-graders in 2014,” Cunningham said.

The BUSD board’s June 13 meeting included discussion on facilities modification for Sullivan, as did the board’s July 11 meeting. The board did not express a desire to take any action prior to the Aug. 1 site visit, although the facility modification item is expected to be on the board’s Aug. 8 agenda.