By Michelle Giluso

Oak School will be getting its $8.6 million face lift, the Los Altos School District board affirmed at its Sept. 29 meeting.

Marge Gratiot, district superintendent, said the elementary school will be the last of the eight schools in the district to be renovated because it has the least number of permanent classrooms to be reconstructed.

While rumors circulated that Oak School would shut down just as Bullis-Purissima School did last June, Gratiot said all the schools in the district had been under consideration for closure, but Bullis was the only school that “met the criteria.”

Renovations for Oak School are scheduled to begin in summer 2004 after the district relocates the students to portable classrooms at Blach School for the 2004-2005 school year.

The renovation will take approximately a year.

According to Gratiot, the classrooms will get new heating and air-conditioning units, new cabinetry and Internet wiring, and one new kindergarten room will be built.

A Los Altos citizens committee worked for almost a year to develop a master plan for the renovation of the district’s schools, Gratiot said.

After more than 75 percent of Los Altos voters passed a bond measure for approximately $94.7 million in 1998, Gratiot said “the plan was to do the junior high schools and our oldest elementary school (Covington) first and then proceed with the rest of the schools two at a time until they were all completed.”

After the district’s modernization and construction of the first three schools (Blach, Egan and Covington), Gratiot said “it became clear that actual construction costs were considerably higher than they had been just three years earlier when we had done our original projections.”

She said the Los Altos School District Board of Trustees and its Construction Oversight Committee separated the bond-financed construction program into two phases to ease the financial impact.

Phase one, she said, was implemented first using existing funds to modernize all existing construction, to update all new infrastructure and to prepare for phase two.

Phase two began after the first phase was completed and consisted of “mostly new construction,” which Gratiot said might require a supplemental bond measure.

Approximately $1 million of the estimated $8.6 million phase one budget for Oak School’s renovations has already been spent on construction plans, including design and engineering fees and receiving state approval; approximately $7.6 million remains for the actual construction costs.