The Duval County School Board is scheduled to vote October 6 on selling its longtime Southbank headquarters, although where it would move to is still up in the air.
The board tied an ultimately scuttled 2025 sale agreement to a contract to buy a replacement headquarters.
But a long move-out lead-time written into the new agreement with would-be buyer Ashco Inc. may have left members content to sort out that decision separately.
“We have three years” to vacate, Vice Chair April Carney said during a September 15 meeting. “… While we do have some options on the table for where we could move to, we’re not under fire basically to have to get up and go.”
Carney, Chair Charlotte Joyce and member Darryl Willie will leave office in November, so new members could end up making a headquarters decision affecting the school district for decades.
Ashco would pay $15,132,000 for the school district’s officers at 1701 Prudential Drive and an abutting parcel that together cover 4.87 acres. (The company negotiated a price of $15.3 million earlier in 2026 but reduced that by waiving the commission that its own real estate agent would have collected.)
Ashco has expressed interest in creating a mixed-use development that could include two towers up to 30 stories tall and a combination of residential, retail and hotel space, board members were told in August.
The Jacksonville-based company would pay a $1 million deposit within five days of Joyce and Superintendent Christopher Bernier executing a contract to sell. From that point, Ashco would have a 120-day "investigation period" to do any soil testing, document reviews or other any other research needed to find potential problems that could kill the deal.
Developer Chase Properties was doing that sort of review when it pulled the plug in February on its plans for the School Board site, blaming costs from a community-development district obligation for the part of the property located within The District, a significant Southbank development planned years ago but being built now.
After the investigation period, the school district can set a closing date as far as three years in the future to complete the sale, giving the school district a significant window to find a new home. The closing date has to be at least 150 days after the investigation period, so the school headquarters isn't going anywhere right away, anyhow.
The search for a new headquarters by a real estate broker working with the school district has so far focused on an office building at 8928 Prominence Parkway in Baymeadows owned by an arm of Dream Finders Homes and several smaller buildings in the Midtown Centre office park off Beach Boulevard.
The School Board narrowly approved buying the Baymeadows site in November 2025 but canceled that deal when Chase canceled its purchase of the Prudential Drive property that has been the school district headquarters for about 45 years. Located about nine miles southeast of the current headquarters, the $13.65 million parcel has been faulted by critics as being too far removed from Northside and Westside residents.
Two Midtown Centre buildings, which are three miles from the current headquarters, were estimated in August to cost about $16.3 million to buy and renovate to house 400 school district employees, the number now at Prudential Drive. Neighboring buildings could be refurbished to accommodate school district employees working in other sites around the county but that could raise the total bill for Midtown to as much as $34.3 million, tehe board was told in August.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: School Board to vote, once more, on selling downtown headquarters
