PUSD opens Design 39 Campus

A school like no other among Poway Unified’s campuses opened in August.

Design 39 Campus, the district’s first and only K-8 school, opened in Del Sur with 860 students in kindergarten through sixth grade. A seventh grade will open in August 2015 and eighth grade in 2016. The school is designed to accommodate up to 1,450 students. It is next door to Del Norte High School.

With a goal of reinventing the way a school is run and students are taught, Design 39 Campus is doing things differently — starting with how it names things. Unlike Poway Unified’s 38 other schools that often have names reflecting geographic features or community names and incorporate the words “elementary school” or “middle school” in their official name — Design 39’s leadership team advocated for calling it a “campus” and emphasizing how students will be encouraged to be innovative by using the word “design.” The 39 reflects that this is the district’s 39th school.

Other non-traditional terms are meant to further reflect its unconventional style. The library has been renamed “the loft” and was made to have a coffee shop atmosphere. Labs have been dubbed “makeries,” where for part of the day they can be art rooms and other times the venues for science experiments. The multipurpose room is called the “showcase.” The administration building is now the “welcome center,” a way to start from the beginning in changing mind sets and making school a less forboding place, according to Principal Sonya Wrisley.

“If we change the way we talk about things, we’ll change the way we do things,” Wrisley explained.

Even teachers have a new moniker. They are called “learning experience designers” and teach in teams instead of having individual classrooms. Students rotate between teachers not only for various subjects, but week-to-week according to their progress in each subject.

Opening the 156,000-square-foot campus on the 23-acre property was controversial, especially when families living within walking distance found out their children could not attend the school since only those whose Mello Roos fees paid for it were allocated a proportion of the seats based upon how much money their residential area contributed toward the school’s construction. A lottery was held to fill each grade level. It opened with around 130 students per grade, leaving around 20 seats at each level to accommodate future students who will move into homes currently under construction or whose homes are yet to be built.