The Innovation Campus, an extension of the MHS main campus, will be open to MHS students in August for the 2024-25 school year, Principal and Chief Innovator Greg Wohlman said. The application to enroll into the Innovation Campus can be found on the MHS website and will be open till Mar. 1, Wohlman added.
The student population at the Innovation Campus will start off small with primarily Engineering and Technology (E-Tech) Academy students and incoming ninth graders, Wohlman said.
“We’re hoping to have 265 to 300 students in August,” Wohlman said. “And within another year, probably another 100 and, within two to three years, maxing out at about 500.”
There will be designated transportation for students involved in after-school activities on the MHS main campus, Wohlman said. Students attending the Innovation Campus will be let out at 2:41 p.m. on Mondays and 3:10 p.m. on Tuesday through Friday, allowing them to return to the main campus, he added.
“If there’s an event during the middle of the day, that may be something that the students attending the Innovation Campus won’t be able to attend,” Wohlman said. “But it goes both ways. If there is an event on the Innovation Campus that students (at the MHS main campus) want to attend, they may not be able to attend that.”
The Innovation Campus will have classrooms with “accordian walls” that can move to conjoin classrooms, E-Tech student and sophomore Ziad Elkordy said. Elkordy has visited the campus multiple times and was involved in making a video to show parents and students what the campus will be like, he added.
“We got to see classrooms that were fit to the students’ opinions and what they wanted and what they were looking for in a school,” Elkordy said. “Mr. Wohlman looked at what the students wanted and that’s what this (the Innovation Campus) is based off.”
While the Innovation Campus is focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) majors, it is also a campus for students who want a smaller setting or different elective choices, Wohlman said.
“It will be hard moving over there since I do have a lot of friends on this (main) campus,” Elkordy said. “However, moving over to the Innovation Campus is overall good because eventually you will make new friends (…) On normal days, you’ll be let out at 3:10 which allows you to come back to the main campus in order to still maintain those relationships.”
The bell schedule for the Innovation Campus includes a standard six-period schedule on Monday and alternating block schedule days from Tuesday to Friday, according to a parent presentation held on Jan. 25.
“We’ve had multiple drafts and now, we’ve settled on something that is very close to being done, but it could move a couple minutes one way or another,” Wohlman said. “If we have students that need to attend a certain college or working with colleges, what can we do inside their school schedule at the Innovation Campus to continue that?”
The block schedule days will include a seventh period for Project Based Learning (PBL) called “PBL Land”, which will include dedicated student collaboration time, according to Executive Director of Learning and Innovation Priti Johari.
“There’s also time in the day that’s focused on project-based learning that’s going to be driven by students’ passion projects—what are (the) needs that they are seeing in the community, and they want to work on filling?” Johari said.
The current focus is to increase Innovation Campus’ student enrollment numbers as well as the number of teachers who are willing to teach there, Johari said.
“If we don’t have students or teachers, we don’t have a campus,” Johari said. “So we are really working on sharing these ideas with our students or families and with our teachers and getting their buy-in.”
The Innovation Campus will not offer any Advanced Placement (AP) courses as of now, according to a frequently asked question document on the MHS website. However, dual enrollment courses will be offered, which include world languages.
“I hope our dual enrollment class can become equal to some of our AP coursework because our post secondary institutions via your colleges and academies and such are also looking at dual enrollment courses,” Wohlman said. “If our Innovation students have dual enrollment courses, internships at our local tech firms or summer jobs at our local tech firms, they are building their resume.”
While the addition of the Innovation Campus offers a new pathway for students, it is not meant to create competition between the different campuses in Milpitas, Johari said.
“We want you all to thrive and now we are creating multiple campuses between the MHS main campus, the Innovation Campus, the Middle College, and Calaveras Hills where we are really thinking about how students learn and how we can create those different opportunities for them,” Johari said.
One of the most appealing aspects of the Innovation Campus is its interdisciplinary focus, E-Tech academy lead and math teacher Mimi Nguyen said.
“The students can actually use the projects that they built in the engineering class, bring it into the math class, and then do calculations on it,” Nguyen said. “So we’re not just looking at problems in a textbook, but looking at the students’ project, so I think that’s something that’s cool that we can try out and we have the opportunity or more flexibility to do that.”
The Innovation Campus was awarded a $1,500,000 grant from the California Department of Public School Construction for construction, Superintendent Cheryl Jordan said. The campus received other grants such as $750,000 from the Kelly Foundation along with federal funding to construct the buildings, Jordan added.
“I will continue to work with other legislators, senators, Congress people, as well as corporations because my goal is to raise $14 million,” Jordan said. “That way, our Innovation Campus is something that’s built not only with our own resources from the city, but also with resources from others around our city that support our region.”
Kevin Ting contributed to this coverage.