Frenship Independent School District is in the middle of construction on several new buildings for its elementary and high school students using an $85-million bond voters approved in May 2014.
Administrators aimed to accommodate the districts growing enrollment problem.
Construction is almost complete on an elementary school named Upland Heights; plans are to open in August.
Director of Public Relations Andy Penney said Upland Heights will be bigger than the other Frenship elementary campuses. It will host between 850-1,000 students.
“It’s the same footprint as the last few elementary campuses we built,” Penney said. “The only difference is this will have a full size competition gym just to help our community with some little dribbler leagues and some events like that.”
The high school is also getting a new building.
Currently, Frenship high is almost at the 2,600 student capacity.
There were talks of building another high school but the community wanted to stay a one-school-town so the district decided to use land across the street and build a 9th grade campus.
Frenship broke ground in December and plan to open in August 2017.
“We have three middle school campuses in our district so that will allow those 8th grade students to move up into 9th grade, have one year together to kind of make some new friendships and figure out what high school is about,” Penney said.
The library and media center also went through major technology upgrades that will overhaul the learning strategy.
“We modernized that room,” Penney said. “We put some collaborative learning environments in there as well as what we call collaboration stations where students can get together, do collaborative research together on a project.”
And the high school didn’t stop there.
This month, Frenship opened the second FIFA certified soccer pitch in the state of Texas on the high school level.
“Our soccer program started in 2010, so it’s kind of a new program for us,” Penney said. “Not only is the program fairly new but now a stadium to call home and not having to play on the football stadium, it’s just been an exciting time for that soccer program and we look forward to great things there too.”