Westside leadership hosted a community meeting to unveil their plans for the new courtyard renovations and the locker room renovations. These updates are scheduled to have a soft start November 1, and a full start December 15 going into winter break. With Westside Superintendent Dr. Mike Lucas and Westside High School Principal Dr. Jay Dosstal in attendance, the meeting was led by Matt Wegner of BVH Architecture, Kristin Larsen of The Weitz Company and Matt Herzog from Project Advocates.

Some key points within the courtyard renovations are expanding it from 390 seats to 550 seats, adding flexible furniture, improving traffic flow and lighting, as well as having an outside patio.

“Our goal is to have a diversity of seating, not just standard cafeteria tables. [We want] high tops, different types of seating, different types of grouping, to give a lot of flexibility and choice with students and how they want to eat lunch and who they want to eat lunch with,” Wegner said.

The courtyard expansion includes an addition of 2500 square feet, including a new outdoor patio on the north side by Pacific Street.

“It’s a little more enclosed, just for security reasons. The only way to get access to that patio is through the cafeteria,” Wegner said.

Some similarities from before the remodel and expansion will remain, including fully removable furniture in case of events, one fully glass wall that spans two stories, and the same overall usage. However, differences will be coming within the look and layout leading into the servery as well as the servery itself.

“Wood slat soffit is a wayfinding piece that guides you to the servery,” Wegner said. “We want to warm up the space with materials. Have a place for trash and a condiment station, things like that. Really keep it organized and controlled.”

Additionally, new red accent panels and signage will be added to the outside of the new remodel, and the sidewalks will be fully replaced. There will be new green space outside, which will all be finished over summer along with the servery. While this will cause noise, temporary insulation will be put over windows affected in the 300s to prevent some sound. This will not be so easy with the locker rooms, although contractors will be returning for these projects and as such, will know their expectations, including noise control and building and student safety.

“It’s going to be a little loud getting some of the concrete and the demo done, but we’ll coordinate that, I believe those are underneath the gym instead of a classroom, which helps a lot for the noise. Obviously, we’re going to chip out quite a bit of concrete for the plumbing, which is, as you can imagine, not the quietest of construction activities. If you’re using the gym for testing or anything, we won’t be doing anything that day. So there’s been a lot of communication, with just coordinating those things,” Larsen said. “And there’s a handful of the contractors that are working on the life complex that are also going to be working on this. So they know all the expectations of working in the school, which helps a lot too.”

Along with coordination comes safety, something that the Weitz company is very big on and has done well with during the Life Complex expansion.

“Weitz has been a great partner,” Dr. Lucas said. “They really have stressed safety. Our Board of Education, they do a great job of making sure that while all these exciting things are going on, we start with student and staff safety and Weitz really takes that extremely serious, [and has had] great communication with the high school.”

The new locker rooms will have close to 700 lockers in both mens and womens, and they will have the same square footage and a similar layout, with quadrant lockers, new showers and coaches’ offices, as well as a meeting space that opens to the sports mall that can therefore be used by anyone who may need it.

“You have a locker area [in quadrants], centralized coaches’ office and lockers, and then each of these has [new] restrooms with new showers and new sinks that can feed into each each area of the locker room so each section can be controlled or shut down individually depending on who needs to use it,” Wegner said. “[For] ADA accessibility, upgrading the showers and the toilets was incredibly important. Then we have a team planning room with access from the corridor so it can be used by everyone.”

For parking, Westside will have about a net zero increase, as some parking in the jock lot will be staff parking temporarily due to the main entrance staff lot being closed off for cafeteria construction staging and offices, although the main lot student parking will not be affected. Additionally, students will get lunch in the current servery, but will have a new exit path due to construction, and will eat in the activity gym.

“Students will go into the kitchen to get their food when they leave, there will be a plastic path on our carpet out here that will lead them all the way over to the activity gym,” Dostal said. “The activity gym is not going to be a fancy cafeteria. It’s going to be the old school roll up 12-foot tables that fold out that we can clean up. The reason we can use that is because by that time, the secondary gym in the Life Complex will be open, and so the activity gym becomes our temporary cafeteria for the remainder of the year.”

Also of note, the post murals in the current cafeteria and the flags will be saved for the new one, but the bricks outside will be replaced and put inside.

“There’s a lot of bricks out front of our main entrance that are dedicated in memorials,” Lucas said. “Those will all be recaptured in the new project as well. So there’s a brick out there that says John Doe 1958, there will be a new brick that says, John Doe 1958, when this is all done.”

“The flags of the different countries represented are going to be in the new cafeteria,” Dostal said. “The murals that are around the post, the posts aren’t going away. We’re going to get those murals, and we’re gonna put them back on the posts, so you’re bringing kind of the old back into the new.”

If you are interested in viewing the renderings and the slide deck from this meeting, it is now published on the district’s website.