Glendale Board Votes to Expand Hoover High to 4-Year School

The Glendale Board of Education this week decided to expand Hoover High School by adding the ninth grade classes from two junior high schools. The high school now has grades 10 through 12.

The action, which was recommended by the district staff, is designed to meet imminent enrollment growth.

In an informal vote Tuesday, the five-member board unanimously set in motion the planning for a 26-classroom addition to Hoover, in northwest Glendale. The extra classrooms would be filled by about 700 ninth-graders from Toll Junior High School across the street and Roosevelt Junior High School in the south end of the city.

Both Toll and Roosevelt are now at capacity and are still growing in enrollment, Supt. Robert A. Sanchis told the board. The shift of ninth-graders would open 13 classrooms at Toll and nine at Roosevelt, which was already expanded by 12 classrooms in a building project completed in 1987, Sanchis said.

As part of the plan, about 180 seventh- and eighth-grade students would be transferred from Roosevelt to Toll.

Sanchis proposed the reorganization as a “bold and creative” move to relieve enrollment pressure at the two junior high schools while gaining the instructional advantages of a four-year high school, especially for college-bound students.

Eighty-six percent of the high schools in California now are on the four-year program, he said.

A single speaker opposed the proposal Tuesday. Hoover High School biology teacher Gene Anderson said he thought the district was rushing the expansion of Hoover, which he said is already crowded.

Anderson said the high school’s 250 excess students have been accommodated by conversion of facilities such as language labs, the choral room and portions of the faculty lounge into classrooms.

“I find it incomprehensible increasing the size of Hoover by as many as 700 students,” he said.

However, Sanchis told the board that the massive and unanticipated increase of school-age children living in the southern end of the city warrants the speedy measures to develop new classrooms.

In spite of a city building moratorium that has temporarily halted the approval of development projects in the high-density residential areas of southern Glendale, district officials anticipate an additional 953 high school students, 663 junior high students and 699 elementary school students from housing projects that are now under construction, according to a report presented to the board Tuesday.

Sanchis said the district examined several options for opening classrooms for those students and decided that permanent space could be added most easily at Hoover.

Three board members concurred, saying that the district cannot stand still.

“I think this is the most feasible, the most logical plan,” board member Jane Sweetnam said.

Over Parking Lot

An architect retained by the district developed the concept of building the 26 classrooms in a single building over a parking lot on the Hoover campus. The new structure would incorporate the parking lot and would not encroach on any existing school facilities. The project cost of $4 million would be paid from a combination of fees assessed against new development in the city and notes to be taken out against future rents of a former school the district leased to a developer, the district report said.

Sanchis said the plan, even if started immediately, could not produce new classroom space until the beginning of school in the fall of 1990.