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With the start of school a week away, the Mountain View Los Altos Union High School District is preparing to unveil Freestyle Academy of Communication Arts and Technology’s new home for its first full academic year.
The building was completed this past May, nearly nine months past its target date, and students moved in for the last few weeks of classes before the end of the school year. This past winter’s historic rainfall, supply chain delays and logistical setbacks involving PG&E caused the delay, according to Associate Superintendent of Business Services Mike Mathiesen.
Freestyle is a half-day alternative program that enables students to explore their creative talents through various artistic mediums such as film, music, animation and digital design.
“The whole idea of Freestyle is to give students a chance to find or ignite their passion in something. Students should come out of high school being passionate about something, and Freestyle offers a different option for students who are not into theater, who are not into sports, who are not into science and mathematics, but they’re maybe more on the creative side,” said Leo Florenedo, who has taught at Freestyle since the program’s founding in 2006.
While an innovative spirit is alive within the program, outdated classrooms have made it challenging to focus on the work at hand, according to students and teachers.
“I feel like the new building brings more opportunities for students because it has a lot more technology. In the old building we were all kind of cramped,” rising senior Avani Chhabra said.
The new Freestyle campus has five classrooms, a music studio, bathrooms, a teacher conference space and an outdoor stage area for students to hangout during breaks and after school is out. It’s located next to the district’s main office.
Before the new building’s completion this past spring, the program had been housed in five outdated portables dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. Rust, water damage, aged plywood panels and damaged roofing plagued these structures, which had not undergone any significant modernization, according to available records from the district.
Construction was made possible by the $295 million Measure E school bond, which voters approved in 2018. Freestyle’s construction remained within the project’s total budget of $16.3 million, Mathiesen said.
The project team had planned to connect the building to the city’s power grid in October 2022, but that couldn’t happen until March 2023 because of scheduling conflicts with PG&E, further compounded by historic heavy rainfall this past winter.
“We had to wait four months for power,” Mathiesen said. “That delay had ripple effects. Some of this work is sequential.”
The project team needed electricity to do flooring because that process requires a specific temperature maintained by the all-electric HVAC system. The heavy rain also held up outdoor construction, including landscaping and laying concrete.
Prior to the project’s completion, the program was housed in a clump of portable buildings for three years. Students and faculty said the new building gives the school – and the work done within it – a sense of permanence.
“I think the new facility gives students a feeling of being like, ‘Wow, I’m in a pretty special place, because they built it specifically for Freestyle. They spent the money, they have all this equipment that we can use.’ And it gives students a feeling of, ‘I better do something,’” Florendo said.
Freestyle graduate Josue Martinez (class of 2018), who now runs his own freelance media production business, was at the building’s grand opening in May. He said he was impressed with the technical equipment, including a recording studio and a green screen room for animation.
“I think the equipment is honestly a little better than what I had in college, which makes me a little jealous but really excited for them. I’m really excited to see what they’re gonna produce with all that stuff,” said Martinez, who attended the University of Texas at Austin.
Freestyle, nestled next to Mountain View High School, offers students a track that differs from the usual high school curriculum. Juniors and seniors enrolled in the two-year program take three courses related to multimedia arts and communication for half of the school day. They take the rest of their core classes, like math, science and social studies, at their original school, either Mountain View or Los Altos high.
The roughly 160 students enrolled in Freestyle each take two required classes in English and digital media, along with a third course in film, design or animation.
Freestyle is “project-based,” Florendo said, so students don’t typically take tests. Instead, assignments are interdisciplinary, so a topic being explored in English may also be translated into a documentary, animation or design project, depending on a student’s area of focus.
The curriculum “allows students to learn skills, but then we don’t tell them what to create. We just show them how to create it, and it’s up to each student to figure out their idea and use the skills that they’ve learned to make their idea become a reality,” Florendo said.
Students say that Freestyle offered them an alternative to the traditional STEM path often pushed on them through the region’s tech hype.
“I was originally drawn to Freestyle because it was a place where I could focus only on arts, and solely on arts. I felt like growing up around here with the public education system, everything was really pushed towards STEM,” film student CJ Hoo said.
“Everything that we learned in Freestyle is automatically applicable to the real world, like photography skills, or how to create a website,” Hoo added.
The school’s curriculum integrates Adobe applications too, like Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator, and Martinez, who graduated years ago, said Freestyle gave him a “head start” in college courses related to film production, photography and graphic design.
“From a professional point of view, pretty much the fundamentals of everything I do now, I learned from Freestyle,” Martinez said.
Beyond the coursework, many current and former students feel a sense of home at Freestyle, The program builds camaraderie by hosting its own social events like art exhibitions, and even a Spring Prom.
Some students are excited to have a true “home base,” which they said wasn’t exactly provided by the temporary portables. Citing areas to hang out with peers, Hoo said it feels like the new campus is “very representative of the Freestyle community.”
Chhabra said she expects to be lifelong friends with peers she’s met through the program.
“Freestyle is much more of a community than just regular school,” Chhabra said.
Freestyle Academy is a wonderful part of the MVLA opportunities for students. The community is lucky to have such an outstanding program.
I have known many creative students who have taken advantage of this program. I would also call it ‘wonderful’. (/Berkeley dad/)
As a district taxpayer – I am glad that the Associate Superintendent of Business Services Mike Mathiesen was able to direct completion of the project within the original budget! This is hard – in some government instances it Never Happens (VTA – BART ha!) – and like all projects everywhere – there are some exceptional circumstances that Always intervene.
Mathiesen has always impressed me as a great facilities project management / budget professional over almost 2 decades I have watched him serve our community through his MVLA administrative positions.