Students will return in the fall to a new campus after the Facilites Steering Committee decided in a Feb. 1 meeting to move the memorial garden and the benches and trees in the quad to a space outside the northwest corner of the science building while the 16 portables will be relocated to the quad and pool area.

The area in front of the science building will house the memorial garden, the “X” pathway, benches and trees currently outside of the math building.

In addition, it will function as a test area to experiment with aspects of the overall master plan for construction on a smaller scale before moving on to larger scale construction, according to architect Erwin Lee.

Construction will begin immediately after school is out. Starting Monday, June 12, construction workers will dismantle the portables, relocating three to outisde the pool area and the rest to the memorial garden and quad. After reassembling the portables, teachers will have about a week to move in before school begins in August if the schedule holds during construction, according to Gilbane Construciton representative Arnold Teton.

Teton had suggested to the committee the alternative of starting construction during spring break to save money. The extra week would have enabled the construction team to clear the memorial garden of grass, scope out the area for any debris that could cause difficulty for construction in the summer and to put in asphalt in preparation for moving the portables. Although the area would not have been fenced off from students, the memorial garden would have transformed into a shadeless patch of asphalt when students returned from spring break.

“Spring break is an opportunity to buy a little insurance,” Lee said in defense of the alternative.

However, the proposal met opposition from the committee, which “reviews campus and building plans for recommendations prior to requesting approval from the [School] Board,” according to the school’s Web site.

“The fact of that being a memorial isn’t the key thing,” Parent Teacher Association Executive Vice President and liaison to the Facilities Steering Committee Anna Thayer said in opposition to the proposal. “It [the quad] is a place for kids to congregate. It just happened to be a place for a memorial.”

Paly parent Stephen Pond also expressed disapproval, suggesting that construction workers labor for longer hours, or on Saturdays and Sundays, to compensate for time lost if construction did not begin until after the end of the school year.

In a committee vote, the members did not grant the construction team permission to disrupt the memorial garden and quad during spring break.

The master plan for construction did not experience much change. The video production room in the new media arts building is to lose its flexible wall that divides one huge classroom in two. According to Lee, the room will be built in such a way that a wall could easily be implemented at a later date should the need arise.

The broadcasting studio for InFocus will be four feet larger to incorporate a prop room, according to Lee.