New Milpitas elementary school opening in August
For the first time in 48 years, Milpitas will have a new school.
As the finishing touches are still being applied, Milpitas school officials will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the opening of the newly built Mabel Mattos Elementary School on Aug. 7.
The ceremony will take place at 4 p.m. at the school site, located at 1750 McCandless Drive. Milpitas High School was the last school built in 1970.
The new school is being built in phases, and the $16 million first phase is expected to accommodate 238 students in lower grade levels, at the start of the upcoming school year on Aug. 16, according to the Milpitas Unified School District.
It will include an administration building and a two-story building with eight classrooms.
Superintendent Cheryl Jordan said the facility will be a “school of the future” because it will incorporate “personalized learning strategies” in classrooms called learning communities.
“It will employ project-based learning that involves the community around the students,” Jordan said in an email this week.
“Students have to be prepared to be creative thinkers who know how to collaborate in a way that will enable them to be ready for work in a future that will be very different from how we work now,” she said.
The growing district is projecting that roughly 467 more students will come into the city by 2022 and nearly 800 more students total by 2027, with most of the increase in the elementary grades.
District spokesperson Shannon Carr said the
housing in Milpitas “is less expensive than it is in other cities nearby, and it is in a central location to highways and the new BART system making commute to work easier than in other cities,” attracting more families and workers.
Phase two of the new school could open by August 2020, and when all three phases are complete, the elementary school could serve 700 students, from transitional kindergarten through sixth grades, the district said.
The later phases would also include a 2.62-acre joint-use park that students could use while school is in session, and the public can use after school hours are over.
However, the funding for the next phases is not yet secured.
While much of the first phase of Mabel Mattos was funded with money from the 2012 bond Measure E, the district school board is set to vote on adding a new, $284 million bond measure to the November ballot at its Wednesday,
Aug. 1 meeting.
The bond measure would fund building out the rest of the new school, revamping the dual-language Robert Randall Elementary School and upgrading parts of the Milpitas High School campus, which serves over 3,200 students.
It would also pay for district-wide repairs to leaky roofs, aging pipes, and upgrades to safety and security systems, including fire alarms, security lighting, fences, door locks and video cameras, according to district staff reports.
The measure would allow the district to issue $284 million worth of bonds, paid for by increasing raising local property taxes by $60 per $100,000 of assessed property values.
If the bond measure is approved for the ballot, Milpitas voters would need to authorize it with at least 55 percent while voting in the Nov. 6 general election.