School district drops plans to relocate Freestyle Academy

The Mountain View-Los Altos High School District is giving up on plans to move Freestyle Academy, a cutting-edge art and digital media school, to a new location on city-owned land, citing constraints by city officials and logistical problems from having the building next to a highway.

District administrators have sought for years to use the property — a dirt lot located directly north of the Alta Vista High School campus — to build new facilities for Freestyle Academy, which is housed in portables. The 1.3-acre parcel was seen as a valuable way to free up space on the constrained campus at Truman and Bryant avenues that houses Freestyle Academy, Mountain View and Alta Vista high schools and the district office.

But after close to two years of closed-door negotiations amid the city’s demands that a majority of the property remain undeveloped for a future pedestrian bridge, the district has officially abandoned the plans. Freestyle Academy will still get a new building, district officials said, just in its current spot behind the district office.

Launched in 2006, Freestyle Academy is a half-day alternative school that gives high school students a chance to flex their creative muscles, embarking on film, music, animation and digital design projects. The school’s website keeps a running tally of Freestyle alumni going back to 2007, many of whom go on to pursue majors in graphic design, film, creative writing and digital media-focused careers.

Despite being crammed with state-of-the-art equipment, the classrooms themselves are far from the 21st century theme of Freestyle Academy. The school is housed in five hand-me-down portables that date back to the 1970s and 1980s and are plagued with rust, water damage, aging plywood panels and bent and damaged roofing. The district has no records showing that the buildings have ever been modernized.

The original plan was to completely scrap the old portables and construct a single large, two-story classroom building for Freestyle Academy on the city’s lot, located at the corner of Bryant Avenue and Lubich Drive.

Long-term plans by the city call for an extension of Stevens Creek Trail south near the campus, including a pedestrian bridge over Highway 85 that can link Bryant Avenue to Sunnyvale. Doing so is going to require space for ramp switchbacks and construction staging that leaves little room for school facilities, said city spokeswoman Shonda Ranson.

The city has yet to start designing the bridge project, and intends to apply for grant funding for the project through the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA). The hope is that the city of Sunnyvale will also pitch in funding for the project as a partner agency.

“The design is expected to cost around $6 million and will proceed as soon as grant funding can be secured,” Ransom said in an email. “Once design is completed, the city will seek funding for construction.”

What was left, then, was a small corner on the southwest portion of the lot for Freestyle Academy, which would squeeze down key design features of the building, said school district spokeswoman Cynthia Greaves. The close proximity to Highway 85 would also be difficult for Freestyle students doing audio recordings right next to the ever-present sound of traffic.

Previous noise studies released by VTA show that Alta Vista High School is located at one of the loudest spots along Highway 85, reaching up to 69 decibels from the nearest classroom to the highway — roughly equivalent to a vacuum cleaner in a home.

Ambitious plans and more leg room

Despite giving up on the city-owned site, school district officials are still moving forward with a complete revamp of Freestyle Academy. New architectural designs reviewed by the school board last month show plans to build a compact state-of-the-art classroom wing that would ease crowding in portables built decades before the digital media technology housed inside.

Designs reviewed by the board on Sept. 23 show large swaths of space devoted solely to animation, digital media, recording studios and a film room, as well as a design classroom with a designated “wet zone” carved out for the more analog art projects using messy paints and charcoal. It also adds another classroom for the school’s core academic subject, English, enabling the school to enroll as many as 240 students instead of its current 140-student cap.

Special stations will also be set aside for stop-motion animation, enabling students to keep cameras clamped down and steady for the meticulously work of frame-by-frame filmmaking.

The new facility, scheduled to open in fall 2022, will be a big change of pace for Freestyle, which has had to make do with the aging portables since its inception. Leo Florendo, a teacher at Freestyle Academy, said they don’t even have a designated staff room right now — it was sacrificed to create an animation classroom three years ago.

“Right now we have a second studio that’s an old boiler room,” Florendo said. “They used to wash team jerseys in it, and we’ve converted it into a mini studio. It’s really tiny and cramped.”

“There’s not enough places to put stuff, and if we had more storage to put it elsewhere than in the classroom and getting in peoples’ way, that would be helpful,” he said.

The first meeting with the architects wasn’t a lot of fun and was overshadowed by problems, Florendo said, as district administrators tried to abide by the city’s restrictions and fit the alternative school on a small portion of the city-owned lot. The second iteration of the plan, back behind the district office and reconfigured, is an improvement, and Florendo said he and the rest of the Freestyle staff are happy with it and excited for the new space.

The original estimates for constructing the new Freestyle building on the city lot ranged from $14.3 million to $15.8 million. The updated proposal for staying at the same location is now expected to cost $13.8 million.

Despite the focus on 21st century tech and digital media, Florendo said Freestyle Academy largely revolves around the English classes hosted on the site, and that the extra room for a second classroom for the core subject will make a big difference for the school.

“The English class is the most important part, that’s where they get ideas for stories to tell, documentaries to tell, essays to write,” Florendo said. “I’ve taught kids how to make websites, but if they have nothing to put on the website, it’s pointless. Content is king, and a lot of those ideas come from English.”

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