Months after the first shovels of dirt were turned, Duval County Public Schools leaders formally broke ground on a new Spring Park Elementary School while touting ongoing efforts to modernize Jacksonville’s schools.
“We’re very excited about this opportunity,” Superintendent Christopher Bernier told guests in the Southside school’s book-lined media center October 1.
Six years after voters approved a half-penny sales tax to fund school facilities, he cast the building project as part of an effort to “begin to drive what this community so richly deserves: high quality, great learning environments for our kids, for our communities and for our educators.”
Five schools built with sales
tax funds have opened since 2023 and Spring Park is among three others under construction now.
Spring Park, Pickett Elementary and Hogan-Spring Glen Elementary are all scheduled to open by August 2027.
Those latest projects also reflect ongoing district efforts to lower the costs of individual schools.
The new Spring Park, being built with a $36.6 million negotiated price, was once budgeted to cost $60 million, said Jim Culbert, the school district’s chief of operations and technology services.
"We've been able to reduce our costs per square foot," Bernier, who became superintendent in 2024, told people at the groundbreaking. "When I arrived, I was told that building were really expensive and that was the cost of doing business in Jacksonville. What I found out is that with hard work and effort and opening up to different contractors ... we can build quality, quality environments for less money per square foot than we were paying."
The school was among several once expected to be replaced by 2025, but surging construction costs led the school district to delay work until a facilities plan was updated and changing demand levels were considered. Many new schools, including the new Spring Park, are being built larger to fold in students from underused schools that are being closed.
Some people anticipating the new Spring Park are also ready to leave the old school behind.
“This is a dungeon,” said Ted Corley, a longtime pastor at a nearby church who ended up, along with his wife, volunteering hours for cleaning and community projects at the 1940s-vintage Spring Park.
He said the old building lacks many windows ― they were reportedly eliminated during rebuilding that followed a major 1968 fire ― but had thrived and been heavily used in recent years as an international baccalaureate primary school serving an immigrant-rich area where children might speak any of more than a dozen languages.
Corley said he was looking forward to seeing the new school open.
The new Spring Park will be designed to hold up to 946 children from pre-kindergarten to fifth grade, close to twice the current enrollment of just under 500.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Groundbreaking marks work on cheaper new Southside elementary
