Groundbreaking ceremony to be held Oct. 16 for IUSD's new Portola High School
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A date has been set for the groundbreaking of Irvine Unified's fifth comprehensive high school. The IUSD Board of Education, district staff and local dignitaries will gather for a special ceremony to mark the beginning of construction on Portola High School Thursday, Oct. 16. The event, which is open to the public, is scheduled to start at 3:30 p.m. at the future site of the new campus, which will be located on the south side of Irvine Boulevard, west of Alton Parkway. (Click to enlarge the map below.) Because there’s not exactly a parking lot yet, guests are encouraged to carpool. For safety reasons, they’re also encouraged to wear flat, closed-toe shoes.
If all goes as planned, the state-of-the-art secondary school will welcome its first batch of freshmen in August 2016. That’s significant, because enrollment projections indicate IUSD will need a fifth comprehensive high school campus in place to accommodate thousands of new homes -- and to prevent overcrowding at Irvine, Northwood, University and Woodbridge high schools. In 2011, IUSD and its developer partners reached a tentative agreement on the school’s location, setting the stage for an exhaustive evaluation and testing process that culminated with approvals from the California Department of Education and the state Department of Toxic Substances Control. Nearly three years later, the Board of Education passed a resolution formally selecting the 40.2-acre site along Irvine Boulevard and allowing ownership of the property to be transferred from developer Heritage Fields. In anticipation of the Oct. 16 groundbreaking ceremony, the Board of Education recently named the school Portola High after considering a lengthy list of community submissions, as well as a handful of staff recommendations based on those submissions. Other potential monikers included Great Park High, Modjeska High, Veterans High and Park View High. Note: This post has been updated to include the school's new name.
