Millennium Charter High School, stalled by budget woes, set to welcome first class.

A new public high school is coming to Monterey County this year, one that boasts a TV production truck instead of a playing field, and a dance studio and theater in lieu of a gymnasium.

The vision for Salinas’ Millennium Charter High School, which begins Aug. 26, is for an innovative, media-arts-focused school “where students can’t wait to arrive and don’t want to leave,” according to the mission statement.

The curriculum includes the same core subjects as other public high schools – English, math, social studies, science and languages – but the similarities end there.

Millennium is small (this year’s enrollment is 75 freshmen and sophomores, with a cap of 116), which administrators say allows for more individual attention.

“When you have 2,500 kids in a school, it’s easy to get lost,” says Millennium Principal Peter Gray, who until July was assistant principal at Salinas’ Everett Alvarez High School. “We are small enough to know every kid; to be a community, not an institution.”

Millennium’s school days will run longer than most, with classes from 8am-5pm, and its curriculum will reflect a project – and theme-based instruction style that, according to Gray, will prepare students for “any job that requires them to be an independent thinker.”

The school is located within the campus of the Monterey County Office of Education, where it will have full access to an on-site Media Center (including a television recording studio, a “black box” studio for dance and theater performances, and a central control room connected to both). The high-tech facilities were made possible by a $3.8 million federal grant from the Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program.

Media Center Director Hamish Tyler says those resources are crucial for local students who hope to work in media arts. “Statistically, our kids get flushed out; they can’t compete,” Tyler says, citing similar California charter schools such as the Oakland School for the Arts, founded by then-Mayor Jerry Brown.

Millennium was short of funding in 2012 and required a state revolving loan of $250,000 to open its doors. Gray says that money will be paid back with state funding for average daily attendance.

The school’s three Wi-Fi-connected classrooms include a communications lab with four high-def projectors and computers with multimedia software. A gadget-filled trailer on the back of a semi-trailer truck, called the “Tech Mobile,” is outfitted with 19 desktop computers, eight wall-mounted screens and a satellite Internet connection.

Millennium’s curriculum, which sets aside five hours a week for media-arts projects, promises an arts-based approach to the core subjects, too. Whether students are studying the quadratic equation, mitosis or the French Revolution, the subject matter will be approached by utilizing such skills as imagination, mental play, and analogical and metaphorical thinking, Gray says.

Those interested in tracking the school’s progress can listen in on the radio – the school plans on a having a show daily – or watch television, where every Friday night this fall a team of students and teachers will produce a live broadcast of a local football game.

Millennium Multimedia Instructor Jesse Valdez, who worked with local students on football broadcasts last year, is eager to get back in the production truck.

“To see those kids so dedicated really pumped us up,” he says.