On Nov. 6, 2018 the City of Carlsbad voted in favor of Measure HH, an act that would grant Carlsbad Unified School District $265 million aimed at renovations for dated parts of schools, enhanced safety and improving the district’s technology. Carlsbad High’s biggest upgrade is an extensive renovation of the science building scheduled to take place this summer.

Measure HH is broken up into five comprehensive phases and the renovation, part of phase one, is just one of many scheduled upgrades. COVID-19 certainly has changed life in Carlsbad but for the time being – since public work is included in essential work – the renovation is still going full steam ahead.

“The project is actually still on schedule and may in fact be ahead of schedule,” Principal Bryan Brockett said. “With the extended school closure [the workers] have been able to do more extensive work…Public construction projects such as this are considered essential work and should the school closure continue, we could possibly see the summer schedule [with major works originally ending Aug. 17] moved up as well.”

The Phase-one upgrade for Carlsbad High includes the much-anticipated addition of solar panels in the parking lot. The science building itself won’t be demolished but remodeled heavily to better fit a request students have heard their teachers talk about before: incorporated labs in the classrooms.

“The basic idea is to collapse the labs and push the classrooms into the labs,”Science Department Head Nic Levitt said. “In the new model [for the building] our classrooms will be one and a half times their current size because the classes will be pushed partly into the labs.”

For Levitt, one of the best changes about this is not having to share labs anymore, with teachers in the past having been concerned about setting up and taking down labs according to other teachers’ schedules- a situation that benefited neither the teachers nor the students. The revamp goes a bit further still.

 “The lab and classroom spaces will be integrated, so there will no longer be separate lab spaces,” Brockett said.  “Along with that there will be upgrades to each of those classroom-lab spaces, including furniture, storage, technology and lighting. On the exterior, there are some planned upgrades to the interior hallways to make them brighter and more inviting and improvements to the roof.”

The changes have been a long time coming. Carlsbad High has had a long and recent history of renovations but the science building was mostly untouched until Measure HH. The renovation will take care of another issue highly publicized by students of certain classes: sound dampening.

“Sound has also been an issue; if you’ve had Mr. Alexander’s class you know that even when things are relatively quiet, the room is very, very loud – yeah that will be no longer too,” Levitt said, with a slight chuckle.