Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

Groundbreakings Kick Off School Projects for Texas ISD

  • 01/26/18

Belton, Texas — This week teachers, students and administrators held a groundbreaking to celebrate the start of construction for the new Charter Oak Elementary School. When completed for the 2019 start of classes, the new 82,300 SF Charter Oak Elementary School will have capacity for 800 students.

The new school will be a flexible and adaptable 21st century learning environment, based on the building program developed through the collaboration between Belton ISD and O’Connell Robertson. In addition to general and special education classrooms, students will enjoy specialty flex classrooms that offer art, music and computer stations.

Charter Oak was selected as the name to commemorate a historic event in Belton history, where, under a live oak tree, Bell County held its first election in 1850. The live oak tree still exists today, not far from the new school location, near Poison Oak Road in Temple, Texas.

Belton ISD has been identified as a fast growth school district; the projects are part of their Roadmap to BISD 2025, a 10-year facilities master plan to provide capacity for growth through 2025. "Belton ISD has grown by over 3,500 students in the last decade’,” said Dr. Susan Kincannon, Belton ISD Superintendent.

“In the last 20 years, our student enrollment has doubled. By 2025, we will have nearly 15,000 students in our schools.  Planning is essential to our ability to keep pace with the fast growth of our district. O’Connell Robertson’s team has worked side by side with the District to study and develop plans to address our facility needs.”

Earlier this month, Belton ISD held another groundbreaking to mark expansions to Lakewood Elementary School, which will include music classrooms and a new gymnasium. The projects at Lakewood ES are expected to be complete by July 2018. O’Connell Robertson provided architecture, MEP engineering and interior design services for both projects.

Featured

  • Chartwells Launches Campus Dining Evaluation Framework

    Contract food-service management provider Chartwells Higher Education recently announced the launch of BLUEPRINT, according to a news release. The evaluation framework was designed to provide a data-driven and customizable roadmap towards optimizing campus dining services and, by extension, the student experience.

  • school building with glowing circuit board patterns

    AI Is Coming to Schools — But Most School Buildings Still Run on Institutional Memory

    As school districts race to introduce AI into classrooms, administration, and curriculum planning, another conversation is happening behind the scenes: How prepared are school facilities themselves for the operational demands AI will create?

  • Rethinking K-12 Schools as a Continuous Learning Experience

    Most students move through three or more separate facilities during their K-12 journey, yet the built environments they encounter at each stage have traditionally been designed in isolation, with little continuity in spatial language, learning philosophy, or physical resources. Each new school is a reset with different layouts, learning models, expectations, and ways of moving through a building. The next generation of school design is making the case that the first day of kindergarten and the last day of high school can and should feel connected through common support systems and infrastructure in the physical environment.

  • Minnesota District Converts Middle School into Community Hub

    White Bear Lake Area Schools in White Bear Lake, Minn., recently announced the end of a major renovation project that converted a former middle school into a new centralized district and community hub, according to a news release.