New St. Johns County School Construction Put On Hold
Recently, the St. Johns County School District has postponed the construction of a new K-8 academy that was supposed to begin construction soon enough to open for the 2023-2024 school year. However, the school will most likely not be ready until the start of fall of 2024 instead.
The main reason for this minor push-back is because of bidding reasons. This year, the contractors who recently built a school that is the exact same style as the projected one said they could build the new one for $56.2 million, which was already the lowest of three bids, whereas two years ago, another school was built the same way for just a $37.2 million bid. This large difference was unaccounted for in our school district’s budget this year, so they decided to push off the start of the building one year.
St. Johns County School District is hoping that the construction companies will change several aspects of their plan and encourage more contractor participation to eventually reduce the cost.
The school building was said to have been inflated so much due to the high demand for students to be relocated. This is because of the high amounts of overcrowding in current schools. Because the demand was so high to eliminate some of the overcrowding issues throughout St. Johns County, the timeline for building the school was accelerated, leading to an increase in cost for the school to be built because of the amount of extra work that would need to be put in daily in order to complete construction in time.
Sources:
By: Sofia Bostic
