Rockridge Secondary School  Rockridge Secondary School is a five-year secondary school located in West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is one of the three principal public high schools in West Vancouver. The school has a grass field and one baseball diamond. The main field is used for all sports, such as soccer, Canadian football and rugby. As early as 1993 the District of West Vancouver received considerable demand that a new community centre was needed in the western part of the district, due in part to the district’s rising population throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the geographic positioning of many of its residents – the main community centre was a 15-30 minute drive for some. After a piece of vacant land in the Caulfeild neighborhood was purchased, plans began for a multi-use facility, which would house a swimming pool, gym, and new middle school. After several rounds of public input and concerns over expenditure, the project was scaled back to build just a middle school that would replace the aging Hillside school 5 km away in upper Ambleside. As 2012, the school receives hundreds of international students every year to make school exchange, mainly students from China, Japan and South American countries such as Brazil and Colombia. The design and construction of the school was at the time considered to be very advanced. With a concrete superstructure and wood roof and supporting beams, the school resembles a ski lodge. The groups of beams put together on the front side of the school, resembling trees some say, help with stability and support during a tsunami. Also, the lights in many of the classrooms are hung from thin cables to allow sway, again in the event of an earthquake. Technology was a key area of expenditure, with BC Tel (now Telus) and SD45 investing in hundreds of kilometres of fibreoptic cable and extensive audio-visual networking equipment provided by Dynacom. The result was the most technologically advanced school in the province – televisions in each classroom were networked with a tape room and broadcast centre which provided a morning news slide show (as well as VHS and DVD presentations in classrooms), fibreoptic cable reached each classroom, and geothermal heating and cooling regulated the building’s temperature. Today, much of the fiber optic equipment is unused, due in part to the declining application of fiber in a LAN environment in the late 1990s. Rockridge opened in September 1996, as a middle school serving grades 7-9. After the restructuring of the School District 45 in the 1998-1999 school year, elementary students stayed at their schools that were expanded to include grade 7.