Building a Brighter Future
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With the shovels turned on two new elementary schools, and more construction, renovation and additions planned for the entire system, it’s anything but the same old thing in the Victoria Independent School District.
Following voter approval of a $159 million bond, the system has been systematically putting into place an ambitious building program that, when completed, will have put up five new schools – two elementary, one middle and two high schools. The Victoria ISD also is embarking on major improvements on all campuses and will convert Memorial High School into a special events facility that will include a natatorium and auditorium.
With an enrollment of around 13,700 students and growing each year, the building program can’t come too soon, says Superintendent Bob Moore, who was point man for the bond campaign and is working to ensure smooth progress through the various stages of construction and renovation throughout the district. For Moore, the influx of funds means making a good district even better, first through smaller populations at each school, and then through flexibility across the system.
“The new elementaries are scheduled to open in 2009, then the middle school and high schools in 2010,” Moore says. “And then we’ll be able to reduce the size of our elementary schools from 600 to around 450 students, our junior highs from around 1,100 students down to 700 and, maybe most importantly, our high school population down to 1,700 or so instead of 3,600. That’s what the community supported in the campaign, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Flexibility was the watchword of the bond campaign, and by that Moore says the district plans to utilize its new campuses to create smaller learning communities within each of the schools, an approach with proven results in other systems around the country.
“We were told quite clearly by parents and students that they didn’t like these big schools and didn’t think they were conducive to learning,” Moore says. “They were right, and so now we’re going to build our new schools, then selectively go through and look at the buildings we have left to see how we can best utilize them.”
Some facilities will remain unchanged, such as the advanced academic center and early college programs at Memorial-Stroman, the district’s ninth-grade campus, while others, such as Memorial High, will be almost unrecognizable after the dust settles.
The Memorial campus will be the site of an indoor swimming pool complex and a multipurpose auditorium that both the district and the community at large will be able to use. The school itself may be converted to general-purpose office space for community agencies, but that’s yet to be determined. Whatever happens, this component of the overall improvement package is creating the most buzz around town — in a good way.
“There’s more excitement around the idea of the natatorium and performing art auditorium than just about anything else,” Moore says. “We don’t really have a large auditorium in this community, and this is something that the community really wants.”
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Story by Joe Morris
Photo by J. Kyle Keener
