Students will be able to take classes at both the main campus and the Extension campus next school year, according to Principal and Chief Innovator of Milpitas High School and New Campus Programs Greg Wohlman in a ParentSquare email titled, “Big News for MHS Students & Families — Twice the Campus, Twice the Opportunity!” on March 13.
“Starting in August 2026, buses will connect the MHS Main campus and the MHS Extension at the Innovation Campus, allowing students to take courses at both locations on the same day,” Wohlman said in the email.
There are roughly 120 students currently at the Extension campus, Wohlman said in an interview. It can comfortably house around 420 students, but that number can be around 460 with more shared spaces, he added.
“But that doesn’t mean now, with our new model, it can be a different 400 (students) every other period,” Wohlman said. If the main campus was “on the block (schedule), it could be a different 400 every two periods. That doesn’t mean every student has to be on that bus. You could have students that spend their whole day at the Extension; you still have students that spend their whole day here.”
According to Wohlman’s March 13 email, students could sign up to take classes at the Extension Campus that are not available at the main campus. The new opportunities allow students to take classes in a variety of different combinations ranging from two consecutive main campus classes, followed by up to four Innovation Extension campus classes, or vice versa, the email said.
Certain classes are only available at one campus; for example, Physics and PE (Physical Education) will only be available at the main campus, while certain engineering elective classes will only be offered at the Extension campus, according to the MHS Extension course request form. The form closed on March 23.
The vision for the Extension was for students to be able to travel back and forth between campuses, Superintendent Cheryl Jordan said. One of the biggest reasons the district has heard from students on why they did not want to move to the Extension was that they did not want to be there the entire day, she said.
“It was always meant to (have) a shuttle bus going back and forth,” Jordan said.
The district will be hiring extra bus drivers to take students back and forth between periods throughout the day, Jordan said.
“Potentially, that could provide service for about 200 kids (both ways),” Jordan said.
The school modeled their new initiative off of a school district in Colorado which had extension campuses for their high schools that allowed them to bus back and forth, and it seemed to work extremely well, Jordan said.
“They have five high schools that all have an extension, like us, and they do busing back and forth,” Jordan said. “The only thing they said is that teachers have to know that sometimes the kids are about 10 minutes late to class. What we’re trying to figure out is how we could do the exchange – during lunchtime, break time, or at the start of the day – so that kids aren’t late from one class to the other class,” she said.
Junior Alvin Vo believes that students will not be very interested in taking classes at the Extension, since no one wants to go to a different school to take classes that aren’t very interesting, he said.
“I know someone at Innovation (Extension) Campus, but I’ve heard they wanted to move back here because there’s no one over there,” Vo said. “Everyone – all their friends – are over here (main campus),” he said.
For students at the Extension campus, this is a big change that will likely draw many students to the main campus to take classes, junior and Extension campus student Tyler Roden said.
“I think it’s good both ways because there will be a lot more people coming to Innovation now,” Roden said. “At MHS (main campus), there’s just a lot more things you can do, like elective choices. At Innovation, there really is only one to two electives. There just is a lot of variety there (main campus) for classes.”
Roden believes it was good the new announcement was made after regular scheduling was already complete, he said. This new opportunity will allow the Extension campus’s students to benefit from both campuses, he added.
“It gives more people the opportunity, because I feel like a lot of people do things last minute,” he said. “Also, most of my friends are from the main campus, so it would be good to see them, too.”
Next year, Roden hopes to use the opportunities at the main campus that are not available at the Extension campus yet, he said.
“I’ll probably join a couple of clubs because I think it’ll look good for college, because there aren’t really any clubs at Innovation,” Roden said. “That’s one of the things that I don’t really like.”
Varsity boys soccer head coach James Williams believes athletics is a concern, and the effects the scheduling will have for sports practices and games is still unknown, he said.
“We (staff) don’t know for sure – it (the integration of the campuses) could be negative, could be positive, but more details need to be worked out,” he said.
A proposed block schedule was put up to a vote for teachers in February, but ultimately, the vote narrowly failed, Wohlman said. The Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) stipulates that a two-thirds majority is required for any proposal to pass, he added.
“The block did not pass because of three votes, which means over 100 teachers out of 154 voted for it,” he said. “It was 65 point something, and we needed 66.7.”
Going on the block schedule gives students the opportunity to make the decision to not choose one campus or the other; students will not have to lose opportunities at either campus, Wohlman said.
“Not everything is going to be perfect, not everything is going to line up for every single schedule — but right now, we’re limiting our possibilities, and we’re not using all of our resources efficiently,” he said. “We’re not as efficient as it could be. If we go to the block, I think efficiency will be maximized very quickly.”
Because almost two-thirds of all MHS teachers agree that the block schedule is a good step forward, it is possible that this may come up again next year in the 2026-2027 school year, Wohlman said.
“We’ve done all the research on it and all the background, so there very well could be another vote next year,” Wohlman said.
