Tracy High School students will have to navigate through a construction zone when they return to class in August.

“We have one year of hanging in there and then things will get better,” Tracy High Principal Pat Anastasio said Wednesday. He described some of the projects at Tracy High that will be paid by the Measure E bond approved by voters in June 2006. The bond will also pay for the completion of the West High School campus.

By mid-July, the Tracy Unified School District expects to have a contract to build a new classroom building on the same spot as Tracy High’s old West Building.

The board of education on Tuesday reviewed the budget for the $29.3 million project, which will include a construction contract estimated at $20.2 million, plus the costs for architects, engineers, demolition of the old building and furniture and equipment.

The district plans to take construction bids July 12, but since the school board doesn’t meet again until Aug. 14, the board authorized Associate Superintendent of Business Services Casey Goodall to sign a contract with the lowest bidder.

Goodall told the board that he expects construction will start by early August and take a year to complete. The concrete tilt-up two-story building will include 40 classrooms and a façade that resembles the mission revival style of the original West Building.

He is also bracing to remodel the Hawley-Westlake math and science building, where work will begin in January.

The school will use temporary classrooms for science classes and move teachers back into the building as classrooms are completed. The school will also see a redesign of storm drains on campus and a reconfiguration of parking lots.

Anastasio looks forward to a new office in a new building, and he said students will go to class in a permanent building instead of the portables scattered around campus.

“It will be one project and then another project until all of the portables are gone,” he said.

During a brief tour of the campus Wednesday, he showed how the modular buildings, the oldest along the track at Peter B. Kyne Field, are deteriorating and overdue for replacement.

“About five years from now, this place will look really different,” he said.