SF Valley's Only Public All-Girls School Gets Campus Approval

Panorama City, CA—The Girls Athletic Leadership Academy Los Angeles (GALS LA) received unanimous approval Tuesday by the L.A. City Council for its new project in Van Nuys, clearing the final hurdle for the campus to be built. GALS LA—one of only three public all-girls public schools in LAUSD and the only one in the San Fernando Valley—will begin construction on their permanent home in early 2022 and expects to open its doors for the 2022-23 school year. It will be the only all-girls middle school in LAUSD to have its own campus.

“After moving three times in five years, having our own building means that our students will finally have the stability they need to thrive academically, physically and emotionally,” said GALS Los Angeles Founder and Executive Director Carrie Wagner. “We are beyond grateful to the City Council for their support and to our future neighbors for their willingness to partner with us, modelling true collaboration to our girls.”

In its yearlong effort to engage the community in the campus project, the school worked with local leaders to gain their support and trust, ensuring that the school will have minimal effects on GALS’ new neighborhood. Traffic, noise and privacy concerns were all addressed in the initial design and further changes to the project resulted in strong community support and unanimous approval at the City Council Planning and Land Use Committee, which paved the way for Tuesday’s final approval.

The school demonstrated strong support, with more than 333 residents who live within a half mile of the site signing a petition to bring the school to their neighborhood. In March, the L.A. City Planning Commission unanimously approved the project, expressing enthusiastic support for building a school at the proposed site (14203 W. Valerio St. in Van Nuys), lauding the thoughtfulness of the design that minimized traffic and noise impacts on the neighborhood as well as the community benefit of bringing in a high-quality public school option. Enrollment at the school will not exceed 330 students and 100 of the spots are intended for girls in the immediate neighborhood.

“We’re thrilled to have our own campus where the GALS model can flourish and be accessible to more students,” said GALS Founding Principal Vanessa Garza, herself a product of an all-girls high school. “With its vote, the City Council sent the message that a single-gender education should be an option for all students, not only those whose families can afford to pay for it.”

GALS LA’s college prep program has a demonstrated track record of success, outperforming neighborhood schools in math and English Language Arts with a model that focuses on rigorous academics, social emotional learning and athletics. The state-of-the-art campus would allow the middle school, which serves 96 percent girls of color and 88 percent from low-income families, to have its own standalone campus for the first time in its five-year history.

The environmentally responsible project demonstrates an innovative and sustainable approach to school design and construction. It uses repurposed single-use shipping containers and the bulk of the construction occurs off-site and in half the time of traditional school building construction. The building will be fabricated locally in an L.A. manufacturing facility and the prefabricated modules are delivered to the construction site to be assembled in weeks, substantially limiting construction noise and pollution. While there are schools in the country that have used shipping containers to expand their facilities, there’s scant evidence of entire schools in the U.S. that are built out of shipping containers. There are schools built out of shipping containers in other countries, however.

The entire project will use 72 40-foot shipping containers. A two-story building that will house 16 classrooms will be approximately 21,360 square feet. The facility will also include a 1,960-square-foot multipurpose room and a 2,560-square-foot office, conference space and teachers’ lounge. The campus will also feature multiple spaces for outdoor athletics and movement, including a running track and sports field, and a large covered outdoor eating pavilion. There will also be an on-site pick-up and drop-off area, as well as 41 parking spaces, designed to limit traffic impacts on the neighborhood.

GALS is designed around the science that a single-gender environment can realize powerful outcomes for adolescent girls. Research shows that the performance of minority students in single-gender schools is stronger on all tests on average and nearly one academic year above that of their peers in a co-ed setting. Further research reveals that all-girls school settings help provide students with a comfort level that helps them develop greater self-confidence and broader interests, especially as they approach adolescence.

To learn more about GALS LA and enrollment opportunities, click here.

The Girls Athletic Leadership School Los Angeles (GALS LA)—the first and only all-girls public school in the San Fernando Valley—is committed to preparing a generation of female leaders who lead not just from their brilliant minds but also their hearts. Through the integration of a health and wellness curriculum addressing the physical, emotional, and psychosocial needs of female adolescent development, GALS LA balances the goal of building strong minds and bodies with the opportunity for students to garner the skillset to emerge as leaders of their own lives. The Girls Athletic Leadership School Los Angeles envisions a world where all young women, regardless of their background, have the opportunity to access the skills, knowledge, and self-determination to succeed in secondary school, college, in their communities and the world.