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Schools

Meeting to Kick-Start Effort to Preserve Portola History

Organizers of El Cerrito High School Archiving Project offer to mentor new group for Portola Middle School.

Community members who put in countless hours over several years to preserve El Cerrito High’s history as its old buildings gave way to a new campus hope to see the project replicated at . Offering to act as mentors to a new team, they will host a meeting March 30 to kick-start the Portola project.

The West Contra Costa Unified School District plans to at Donal Avenue and Lawrence Street, where the main building will be refurbished and other buildings torn down and replaced.

The site of the old Portola campus at Navellier Street and Moeser Lane was deemed unsafe for either fixing up the old school buildings or building new ones. Not wanting to leave students in unsafe buildings as they await completion of the new campus, the school district is operating the school out of portable buildings on the lower part of the campus, leaving the old buildings vacant.

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The group will meet at 5 p.m. at at the corner of Fairmount and Colusa avenues.

 “A number of people have expressed interest in saving artifacts from Portola before the school comes down in the very near future," Joann  Steck-Bayat, one of the key organizers of the high school history effort, said in an email. "If you have friends who are interested, please ask them to attend this kick off meeting. Speed and efficiency will be of the greatest importance with this project as once that demolition starts there will not be another opportunity to ‘rescue’ objects."

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Steck-Bayat said she will run the first meeting and, along with Lu Tipping, will be available to consult with the new group. “For those of you don’t know us, “ she wrote, “Lu and I spearheaded the archiving of objects at ECHS which resulted in the high school museum. We feel strongly about the importance of the schools’ history.”

Steck-Bayat said a school district representative will also be at the meeting.

The meeting agenda explains that the El Cerrito High School Archiving Project members met every Saturday for four months. Volunteers went through the school and gathered items  of interest, taking them to a staging area to be cleaned and prepared, catalogued and packed. Volunteers also solicited additional items and funds from the public and worked with architects on the design of the museum built within the high school to display artifacts. The school district provided storage until the new school and museum space were ready.

Steck-Bayat said she’s been told the old Portola buildings will be demolished in summer or fall.

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