While many in the district are relishing the opportunities that come with opening a new school, others are still anxious as the construction calendar starts chugging toward its July 2005 completion date. The next year and five months will test whether all's well that ends well, however, as new programs and schedules and traffic patterns are formed.

One of the most important details is a name for the new school.

"We're going to get a name pretty soon," pledges Rick Hausman, assistant superintendent for business services for the Cupertino Union School District. At the March 9 board meeting, the Cupertino Union School Board awarded bids totaling $15 million for the conversion of Collins Elementary School into an as-yet-unnamed fifth middle school. The Collins student body and administration will move to the former site of Portal Elementary School in December and take their name with them.

"We're pretty excited that it's finally coming to fruition," says Superintendent William Bragg, who was hired in 1997 in large part for his experience bringing sixth-grade students into a middle school atmosphere.

He says the choice of Collins took a number of factors into consideration, but an important reason was that Collins had initially been built in 1948 as a junior high and converted to an elementary school in 1982. Therefore, much of the work that will occur after the Collins elementary students move in December is simply restoring what used to be there.

"This is not a gutting proposition," says Van Adams, the district's director of facility modernization. The old electives building had been converted to a kindergarten wing, so contractors will restore the wood shop, art and home economics rooms that used to be there. A full classroom wing and swing sets will be removed for additional blacktop and playing-field space. The old library will become a wired media center, and the whole campus will be outfitted with wireless Internet hubs. "You try to keep your school as flexible as possible," he says.

Determining these parameters began last spring. Adams says the facilities staff began with consulting current middle school teachers in focus groups. "We went all the way down to mitigating echoes in the gym to how large they want their sinks in the science building," he says.

Adams' aim is also to ensure that this new middle school won't trump the others in the district. "We're not designing the Rolls Royce of schools," he says. "We want to offer the same equity as in all middle schools."

The construction will commence with the three new buildings planned for the perimeter of the Collins campus, to lessen the impact on the remaining students. A dusty area along the west edge of campus will be the site of a new science building—the first two-story building in the district. The northeast portion will become a new administration building and drop-off area, while the southeast area will become a new performing-arts facility/gymnasium.

Adams, who was previously principal at Kennedy Middle School, says that the emphasis on the arts was a priority. "There are going to be after-school sports, of course, but there will be lots of activities going on all the time," he says. And of course, the gym will house those middle school mainstays—dances. "This is a time of intense social change," Adams says.

The entire process has caught some neighboring schools unprepared as they play musical schools. The Cupertino Language Immersion Program will move to Meyerholz Elementary in the fall, which will require some improvements to that campus, and the old Portal site will also need modulars to handle all the Collins students.

The district says these costs are all covered by Measure C, the $80 million district bond that voters passed in 2001. Board member Gary McCue was an area leader in the campaign to pass that bond and shares Bragg's excitement about getting the project off the ground. "It's been such an ongoing project, yet we didn't see how it could work in the beginning," he says. "My son went to Miller, and personally, moving the sixth grades to middle school is one of the things that resonates with me."

In addition to constructing an almost-entirely new school, the project will also push through another of Cupertino Union's longtime goals—moving sixth-graders into middle schools. Parents can currently choose to enroll their students in middle school in the sixth grade, a choice that the district says has become so popular that it now involves lotteries and waiting lists.

Bragg took his position as superintendent in 1997, at the same time that class-size reduction guidelines were handed down by the state. He says that and overcrowding in the elementary schools were the motivation for implementing the sixth-grade shift. The first facilities advisory committee was formed on the issue that same year.

A three-year middle school model is also something the state of California is pushing and one that many in the district promote. "In junior high, they're in one year and out the next," McCue says.

Adams, the former principal, adds that such a tender time in a student's education requires special attention. "The middle school philosophy involves teams of two to three teachers with groups of kids," he says. "In a middle school, you always know who's struggling."

The instructional team, along with the district, is currently figuring out how to best implement these ideas at a school they're building from the ground up. Basic curriculum is state-mandated, so that will stay the same, but the approach is different.

"A lot of what we're working on is already implemented at different middle schools. Here we have the chance to look at it all in one place," says Phyllis Vogel, Cupertino Union's assistant superintendent for instructional services.

She points to a book titled Taking Center Stage, which outlines the state's guidelines for model middle schools. A community survey conducted three years ago determined that parents wanted a neighborhood middle school instead of an alternative school, but the survey also asked for the parents' priorities in the areas highlighted by state middle school guidelines.

The seven areas parents identified were extracurricular activities, electives, hands-on science, team teaching, integrated technology and state standards, and the district has gone to great lengths to research how to best implement these ideals.

When the instructional staff received these results, they formed separate committees for each area consisting of teachers, administrators and parents culled from the future middle school's attendance area. "They've been visiting schools mentioned by the California League of Middle Schools and other schools that were recommended," says Kathy Kelley, the district's resource teacher. "We want to know how these ideas translate."

The committees will present their recommendations to the school board in a study session in April, for a May approval.

Specific programs will be planned by the middle school's principal and staff. Bragg will select the principal this summer, and the guidelines and timing for hiring staff (approximately 35 teachers for a projected student body of 871) will be set forth in the upcoming contract negotiations with the Cupertino Education Association. There are many other issues—for example, periods instead of blocks, quarters instead of trimesters—that will be determined before the school opens, which is projected to occur in August 2005. The district's middle schools do not share a master schedule.

But concern has also surrounded the prospect of sending sixth-graders to an arguably more brutal middle school environment. Those with the district say the plans address those worries. For the first year, the middle school will only feature sixth- and seventh-graders, giving those in eighth grade the chance to finish at their original schools. "We may shelter the sixth-graders a little more," Adams says. "Some kids immediately go off with the eighth-graders, but others want to stay closer to home."

The classroom will also stay somewhat familiar to grade schoolers. Sixth-graders will stay together in the same room for their core class, which is language arts and social studies, but will change rooms and teachers for math, science and physical education classes as well as an elective. The classrooms will purposely be kept close together. Their "core" teacher will be the main teacher, the one with whom parents and the other teachers communicate. "We're going to ease them in. This is not sink-or-swim," Kelley says.

Others don't share that optimism. Collins fifth-grade teacher Beth Wichmann says that sixth-graders don't belong in middle schools. "I think they should stay here," she says. She's fielded calls from parents interested in entering their students in the middle school lottery who are concerned that their children will start at one middle school and end up at another. Wichmann also points out that those students who continue with Collins will move to the Portal site in December—and then come right back for middle school.

These kinds of issues have inflamed some parents during the decade-long discussion over a fifth middle school. Others have protested the inclusion of their school in the new school's boundaries, which now encompasses Garden Gate, Faria, Eaton and Collins elementaries. Melissa Hilton, parent of two current Garden Gate students, ran for the school board last November after campaigning for the school board recall in early 2003.

Her concerns are myriad, ranging from the traffic on De Anza Boulevard to still-overcrowded classrooms to the district's lack of communication with parents. Hilton's school board campaign heavily touched on the latter. "There were over 4,000 votes for me," she says. "I attended a task force meeting in February about the curriculum, and it was vague. There are those of us who think that they just take parent input and still do whatever they want."

The construction process also plagues a district that has seen students go through the system with contractors on campus every school year. "Traffic is already horrible, and we'll just have to expect noise and dirt," Wichmann says. "But we'll just make the best of it."

District officials say they have been involving the community by bringing parents into instructional committees. They also plan to work with the community that will feed into the new school. Many decisions surrounding the fifth middle school are still up in the air and, according to district officials, will be addressed in upcoming public forums—decisions regarding traffic patterns and instructional choices among them. It isn't even known yet which high school this new middle school will feed into.

The middle school does not yet have a name, but at the March 9 meeting, the school board approved a naming policy. The district will accept suggestions for naming schools after individuals who've made significant contributions to the local and larger communities or names based on the geographic location of the building. The district will encourage the public to participate in this process.

But no matter what this fifth middle school is called, little can dampen the enthusiasm of district employees as they set out to do something rare in this day and age: Open a brand-new school. "This is unusual in Cupertino," Bragg says.

"Collins, or whatever its name is going to be, is going to be a real asset to the community," McCue adds.