Class is in session for Meghan Young, at Oxnard’s Lemonwood School.
More than 31 students are wedged into a temporary classroom that really hasn’t been so temporary. The 35 year old campus has relied on a whole complex of portable buildings to handle its more than 900 students. Lemonwood’s cafeteria is so small, and so crowded, that lunch has to be served starting at 10:30 a.m., and continues for two hour to accommodate all of the students.
There has been talk about replacing the outdated school for decades, but Lemonwood never made the final cut on the district’s priority list. It’s been hard for the community, which is made up of many lower income Hispanic families.
That’s changed though, with the school district breaking ground on what will be a new, state of the art $29 million dollar campus. It will feature more than three dozen classrooms, plus state of the art cafeteria What’s making the project possible was the passage by the district’s voters of Measure R, a $90 million dollar bond measure in 2012.
Community leaders and Lemonwood’s students and staff gathered Thursday to celebrate the start of construction, with a groundbreaking ceremony Construction will start next month, with work taking place on open areas of the 9.9 acre campus. The school will be built in two phases, with classrooms first, and other buildings second. Once the new school is completed, the current campus will be demolished.
