After years of planning and anticipation, the city of West Sacramento has a high school worthy of its renaissance.

The new River City High School – a $145 million, state-of-the-art campus – is set to open after the holidays, replacing one of the region's most outdated and crowded high schools.

The old River City High School, on Clarendon Street in a leafy neighborhood, was a blue-and-white collection of cramped and worn structures.

They included a dozen modular units and what some say was a World War II quonset hut that served as the gym.

The school was originally built in the 1950s to hold about 900 students, but there were 1,700 when it closed Dec. 18.

It was so crowded that it was getting hard for students to move around between classes, said Principal Stuart MacKay.

The new River City, near the intersection of Jefferson Boulevard and Linden Road in the city's Southport area, will open its doors to students when they return from Christmas break Jan. 5.

Work crews, which included some students, spent the days before Christmas racing to hook up miles of wiring, while school staff moved into their spacious new digs.

River City's eight glass-and-concrete buildings, with their earth-toned walls and colorful floors, house dozens of classrooms hard-wired for computers, audio and video.

There are more than a dozen modern science labs, a television studio, a robotics room and banks of computer workstations – as well as a large college-and-career resource center.

Outside on the 62-acre campus are a 3,000-seat football stadium, an all-weather track, two baseball diamonds and a competitive swimming pool.

The school was built for more than 2,200 students, but future expansion could allow for 2,800.

River City, the only comprehensive high school in West Sacramento, has struggled for years with high failure and dropout rates.

School officials say that's partly due to the prior school's crowded and substandard facilities. They hope the new campus will set an example and inspire students to succeed.

"We're trying to change the whole culture and raise expectations," said Steven Lawrence, superintendent of the Washington Unified School District. "This school has been developed to help build skills for success in the 21st century."

Earlier this week, the boys varsity basketball team, 10-1 this season, practiced for the first time on their shining new court.

"It's awesome," said Kenny Crane, a forward for the River City Raiders.

Coach Jon West said the boys were excited, and he was pleased with the difference between old and new.

"First of all, things work," he said. The lights and heat were spotty in the old gym, where he coached for 17 years, he said.

And the new court is much larger. The blue-and-gold bleachers have enough seats for the entire student body.

Don Stauffer, chairman of the science department, said a classroom with 40 powerful computers will be used for video editing and running engineering programs.

In other labs, students can pursue research in biotechnology and biomedicine using advanced optics and computers to explore chemical processes and analyze tissue, he said.

Stauffer returned to the old campus Monday to finish packing up his lab. The rooms at the old school were dark, cold and mostly empty.

The chemistry and biology teacher said he had cleaned out decades of materials: aging vials of chemicals, a human skeleton missing a leg, a monkey skull preserved in formaldehyde.

"We're moving from a campus that is 55 years old to a campus with 21st century technology built into it and lots of ability to expand," Stauffer said.

At the new school, Lawrence led a tour of the recreation center that the school will share with the city for residents' use. It has a rock-climbing wall, a recreational pool with slides, tennis courts and a fitness center.

The relationship between the city and the school goes well beyond the fitness center. Improving the sole high school in West Sacramento has been seen as key to the city's long-term economic development.

In recent years, the city has gone from a gritty town known for drugs and prostitution to a thriving center of residential and commercial development.

"Our local schools, and River City High School in particular, must undergo the same transformation as the city has if our community's renaissance is to be durable and universal," Mayor Christopher Cabaldon said in his 2003 state of the city address.

The next year, West Sacramento voters overwhelmingly passed a bond measure that provided $52 million for the new high school.

Millions more were cobbled together from developer fees, redevelopment funds and state matching grants, Lawrence said.

The new campus, said MacKay, is just what the mayor had in mind. "It sets the standards high," he said, "and those high expectations will flow down to the students."

The old campus – which the city may turn into a K-8 school – is steeped in local tradition, and some say they will miss it.

"It has character. It has history. It was rich," said Evan White, a 17-year-old junior who toured his new school this week.

Even so, he said, he was looking forward to attending the new River City come January. "I'm excited," he said. "It's pretty cool."

Call The Bee's Hudson Sangree, (916) 321-1191.