New Del Sol High School will open Wednesday with water despite traffic issues

OXNARD, Calif.-When the Oxnard Union High School District held a rare weekend meeting the board announced plans to open Del Sol High School with or without water, sewer and storm drain connections.

Oxnard City Manager Alexander Nguyen said that authorization usually comes after the approval of an offsite traffic management plan.

The district had a back up plan in place to truck water and rent portable toilets for Del Sol High School, but that will no longer be necessary.

"At this point, making the water situation worse is not useful," said Nguyen, "We should be concerned about bare bones, public safety and we can't cut corners on that."

On Monday, the city agreed to all the water connections as long as the district meets its safety obligations on the roads surrounding the new school.

"It's an imperfect solution to meet the needs of the school district, but I do want to emphasize this, all along, this has been about safety,"said Nguyen.

He said the lack of a licensed traffic engineer for a project of this magnitude astounded his staff.

OUHSD announced it will complete crosswalk striping and turn on traffic signal lights at the main entrance Tuesday and have crossing guards before and after school for the next two months.

"We came together for better communication," said Superintendent Tom McCoy, "

The $275 million dollar project is the district's 13th school and will soon serve students from Rose Park, Lemonwood and La Colonia.

"We have 475 freshman, expecting maybe 500 through the doors on Wednesday morning and each year we'll add a class until this freshman class will actually be seniors when we have a full school of about 2000 students," said McCoy.

By then a new housing project near the school is likely to be well underway.