Drew Charlet

Perry High School is about to undergo a facelift for the second time in the past four years.

With enrollment at 3,650 students and climbing, construction crews will break ground on a C-Building extension sometime this November, according to Principal Dan Serrano.

It was the fall of 2014 when the addition to the F-Building was built to house more classes.

Now classrooms and hallways are jam-packed with teens and traveling teachers, the Chandler Unified School District conceded that it was time for a change for a school that was designed to hold nearly one thousand fewer students.

According to Serrano the school was “built originally for 2,800, we are 3,650,” so new plans have been placed.

The new building will be located between the current C-Building and the staff/library parking lot. “When Perry was built, years ago, there was actually a planning for a building put into effect,” Assistant Principal Kevin Aims stated, “so there is a lot of things underground that are in place already, so a lot of the surveying and all of the pieces that you would need for the space has already been done.”

An additional 24 classrooms will be located in this building, which is going to be an exact mirror image of the new F-300/400 building.

Currently, there are 12 traveling teachers who do not have a classroom to themselves and have to move with each period, but next year they will all have their own rooms. .

Along with all traveling teachers having a room, the class sizes throughout the campus will be reduced. This school year, the English department has an average of 27 students per class. With only one teacher to 27 students, the learning environment can tend to be very crowded and busy.

Administration also wants to eliminate the lone subjects that are mixed in with different subjects as much as possible. “We really want to get it department specific… so i want to get all the same departments in the same area,” Serrano said.

Starting next year, the subjects will be in the same area.

There will also be a new, larger dance room added to the campus. When the construction is finished for the new building and all classrooms are ready,the art teachers, DeCristofaro and Vogt, will be relocated into the new C-Building while their current classrooms will be combined and the wall in between will be knocked down.

Currently, the dance department has one small dance room and limited use to the auditorium.

The director of the dance department and company instructor, Mrs. Sadler, explains that “it will be really nice to have our own space that we will not be kicked out of due to several different events through the course of the year… it will help with our instructional time because when we do get kicked out of the auditorium we are in spaces like the gym, the lobby, where there is carpet, so not the most conducive to our learning space that we need to be teaching in.”

By the 2019-2020 school year, the campus will be finally complete.