LITCHFIELD PARK BOY DIES IN HEAD-ON CRASH, PAGE 4
westvalleyview.com — the newspaper of Avondale, Buckeye, Goodyear, Litchfield Park & Tolleson, AZ 50¢ Wednesday, January 18, 2017 (623) 535-8439
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Trooper shot near Tonopah DPS officer volunteers at Tonopah Valley H.S. by Emily Toepfer assistant editor
JUMPING THROUGH HOOPS Arts festival celebrates 25 years. See photos from Litchfield Park event on Page 9.
ON HER HIGH HORSE Buckeye Days riding back into town for two weekends — Page 10.
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An Arizona Department of Public Safety trooper who was shot Jan. 12 on Interstate 10 near Tonopah has a longstanding relationship with the far West Valley community, officials said. Trooper Ed Andersson has volunteered as the varsity volleyball coach and with other athletic programs at Tonopah Valley High School for many years, said Paul Tighe, superintendent of the Saddle Mountain Unified District. The high school is about 10 miles east of where Andersson was shot in the early morning while responding to a call for service on I-10. At about 4:20 a.m., a driver called 911 to report his vehicle had been shot at by someone in the road at Milepost 89, DPS Col. Frank Milstead said. “He heard a loud bang, but didn’t know if it had struck the vehicle,” he said. “Then somewhere down the Leonard road, his vehicle began to lose power and he Penuelasrealized the car had been Escobar shot.” Other drivers also began to call in reports of a man standing in the road with a gun, a man dragging a woman’s body off the freeway and a rollover collision, Milstead said. Andersson, a commercial vehicle inspector, was inspecting a truck nearby and left to respond to the calls, Milstead said. After arriving at the crash, Andersson saw a man sitting on the ground with a woman in his arms on the north side of the freeway, he said. He exited his vehicle and began to lay down flares when the man, identified as Leonard Penuelas-Escobar, 37, said something in Spanish, Milstead said. Penuelas-Escobar pointed a 9 mm pistol at Andersson and shot him once in the right shoulder, then began attacking the trooper, he said. At that point, another driver who was traveling westbound to California with his fiance saw a man straddling a trooper and stopped to help, Milstead said. The driver grabbed a gun from his vehicle as his fiance called 911. He told Penuelas-Escobar to step away from Andersson, but he responded with profanity, Milstead said. After firing twice at Penuelas-Escobar and disabling him, the driver began to administer first aid to Andersson, he said. But Penuelas-Escobar got up and began attacking them again, at which point the driver shot and killed him, Milstead said. “He knows that he did the right thing, and he’s trying to reconcile that in his mind,” Milstead said about the driver’s actions. “It’s difficult to take a life, even when you know it’s the right thing to do.” Andersson had called for medical assistance (See Trooper on Page 5)
View photo by Jordan Christopher
DENNIS RUNYAN, Agua Fria Union High School District superintendent, speaks Jan. 12 at the groundbreaking ceremony for the district’s fifth school, to be built on the northwest corner of Bethany Home and Perryville roads in the West Valley.
Agua Fria District breaks ground on 5th high school Campus will be 1st new public W.V. high school in a decade by Emily Toepfer assistant editor
Nestled on county land at the base of the White Tank Mountains is the site of the West Valley’s next high school, an innovative campus with an opening date of August 2018. The Agua Fria Union High School District held a groundbreaking ceremony Jan. 12 for its fifth campus, a 237,000-square-foot facility that will eventually house 1,600 students at Bethany Home and Perryville roads. A name and mascot for the school are still being determined with input from the community, but the principal position has been posted and 26 people had applied as of last week, said Tom Huffman, the district’s executive director of operations and safety. The job is expected to be filled by July 1, Huffman said. “There’s a lot of academic programs and furniture and other things that need to be confirmed, and that principal is really the right person to be doing that job,” he said. Officials expect the school to open with only a freshman class unless the district is overwhelmed with enrollment in the next year, Huffman said. Rising enrollment has been a key factor in the district’s push for a fifth campus. “Our schools are full,” Huffman said. “Agua Fria has been a district of choice for several years. We have about 8,000 students in our schools right now, and our capacity is about 500 less than that. So we really needed to address additional space within our schools.” The campus will cost about $73 million total to build, which includes land, permits, furniture, equipment and fixtures, said Dennis Runyan, Agua Fria superintendent. “The land purchase [at just more than $3.5
million] was about 50 percent of the cost of other properties we looked at in the region,” Runyan said. To help fund the school, the district was awarded $33.4 million from the Arizona School Facilities Board last year. The rest will be paid out of a $70 million bond approved by voters in November 2015. The district’s last school to open was Verrado High School in 2006. The new campus will be the first public high school built in the West Valley since Youngker High School in Buckeye opened in 2007. “There have been very few comprehensive high schools that have opened in this state since 2008,” Huffman said. “The world has changed a lot, so we need to build a different kind of school to address those needs and prepare students for a different world that’s out there from when some of our other schools were built.” The campus was designed by DLR Group and is organized around four learning suites, nicknamed “forts,” that will have moveable walls. Each suite will have two science labs and five open, flexible classrooms. An Agora, named after the Greek word for marketplace, will provide informal outdoor learning areas and café spaces. “Connectivity was a primary goal of the design. We incorporated sliding and folding walls to maximize the variety of spatial interrelationships within the learning suite,” said Pam Loeffelman, who leads DLR Group’s K-12 Southwest practice. “The flexible design and furniture allow teachers to adapt their space to their teaching style rather than their teaching style to the space.” Another innovative feature of the high school is a first-of-its-kind teaching and learning “Accelerator,” which will house the auditorium. It’s designed as two spaces working in tandem. (See School on Page 2)