Huntington Beach’s Sowers Middle School celebrates new gymnasium, other upgrades
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Ravi Sohoni has been a physical education teacher at Isaac L. Sowers Middle School in Huntington Beach for more than 30 years. During those three-plus decades, the school has never had its own gymnasium.
He saw the basketball teams practicing at the district’s other middle school, Dwyer, or on the blacktop court at neighboring Moffett Elementary or the Edison Community Center.
Sohoni, who will retire from the Huntington Beach City School District in a couple of years, knows that good things can come to those who wait.
Sowers Middle School celebrated the completion of phase two of its reconstruction with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Wednesday.
“We’ve been waiting for this gym for 32 years,” Sohoni said with a laugh on Wednesday afternoon inside Sowers’ new state-of-the-art gymnasium. “But yeah, it’s amazing. The whole school is going to be amazing.”
The district’s operations director, Mark Manstof, said that in addition to the new gym, there’s a new locker room building and hard court area featuring ball walls and basketball and volleyball courts.
Outdoor nodes between the “Viking Union” and the gym were expanded. The parking facilities were also improved with a two-lane drop off system.
“The new pickup and drop off is a really big feature for us, because there’s a lot of congestion on Indianapolis [Avenue] with pickup and drop off,” Manstof said. “It was like that with the old honeycomb building, it was like that during construction. We worked pretty diligently on a design that would try to move traffic off the ancillary streets around us and onto the campus, working with Huntington Beach city as well.”
Phase one of the Sowers reconstruction project concluded in February 2024. The first phase included five American Modular System GEN7 prefabricated buildings for 27 new classrooms, as well as a new science, technology, engineering and mathematics building.
District Supt. Leisa Winston said the phase two completion will round out the entire student experience at Sowers.
“Yes, the academic environment is very important to us, but having this space for students to be able to engage in physical activity, having an indoor space during inclement weather — as infrequent as it is, it’s nice to have that space,” Winston said. “It’s a similar model to what we have at Dwyer, so now our two middle schools have an equitable experience.”
Sowers Principal Jeff Smith and District Board President Diana Marks also addressed those attending the ceremony. Marks, a former teacher at Sowers herself, was moved to tears as she highlighted retired longtime Sowers teacher Bill Bates, who came in from Washington for the ceremony.
Marks said that the new STEM building will be named after Bates and his wife Rebbie, another longtime Sowers teacher.
Officials said the total Sowers reconstruction project estimated cost was $72 million. It was funded by Measure Q, sale of the former Gisler Middle School property and additional facilities funding.
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