MOORPARK : Ground Broken for Continuation School

The Moorpark Unified School District held a ground-breaking ceremony Friday at the site where a new continuation high school will be built.

The ceremony was attended by school district officials and a representative of state Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), a school district spokeswoman said.

The new Moorpark Community High School building, which is expected to be completed by next September, will be at 5868 Condor Drive in the Moorpark Business Park. Construction is expected to cost about $1 million.

The new school will not be substantially larger than the school’s present building. It will have six classrooms, compared to the four that the school uses at the old Moorpark Memorial High School building at 280 Casey Road, Principal Gabino Aguirre said. He said the school will probably use one of the classrooms as a weight room for students.

But the new 8,000-square-foot building will have a library, which the school does not have now, he said. In addition, school grounds will have a baseball diamond and a basketball court.

The building will be significantly smaller than the school district had wanted, Aguirre said. The state turned down the district’s request for a second phase of construction that would have added more classrooms and increased the maximum capacity of the school to about 150 students, he said.

But Aguirre said the new building will be adequate for the current school’s students, who number about 80.

“I think that one of its main advantages is that we’ll finally have a stable building to identify with,” Aguirre said.