AET satellite campus closing

The Santa Monica College Academy of Entertainment and Technology satellite campus, located on Stewart Street and Olympic Boulevard, will be closing for remodeling over spring break.

The $62 million project will officially begin on April 8, closing the AET campus for about two years, according to Greg Brown, director of facilities and planning at SMC.

Classes on the AET campus will be transferring to either the Bundy or Airport campus as soon as students return to classes on April 15.

Professors are informing their students about which satellite campus they will move to, in order to avoid confusion on the first day back from break.

The location of the class will be the only factor affected. Meeting times and professors teaching the courses will remain the same.

According to Bob Isomoto, SMC's vice president of business administration, the campus will be gaining a new, more technical look.

"They will be adding a bigger parking structure," Isomoto says. "They will also add a new building for KCRW."

According to Brown, the existing building will be remodeled, and there will be an addition with an auditorium, television studio, and video and audio editing.

Cindy Martinez, 21, a third-year student at SMC, wonders if this major change will affect the way classes are being taught.

"My first semester at SMC, all of my classes were at the AET campus," Martinez says. "Now I only have one class at the Bundy campus, but just to think that the classes from AET will be moving here worries me that it will get a lot more crowded."

Martinez says that she is concerned about other classes moving to different campuses, fearing that the parking situation will get a lot worse.

"There will be some disruption during the move, but there will be great improvements with the new facility," Brown states in e-mail. "We are provided sufficient space using portable buildings, but parking will be tight."

The Bundy and Airport campuses are both located next to each other near the Santa Monica Airport. Each campus has its own parking area.

According to the AET campus website, this campus is specialized forstudents who wish to gain technical proficiency, offering areas of study in fields such as graphic design, entertainment technology and interior architectural design. To learn more about these programs, visit academy.smc.edu for more information.