Officials held groundbreaking amid busy construction of 2,500-student school to open in 2026.
If you haven’t taken a ride on Nova Road east of St. Cloud recently, you’ll notice plenty of new things.
A traffic light has added safety at the intersection of U.S. 192, its southern terminus.
There’s rooftops, lots of new residential rooftops. If you live in that area, the city has definitely come out to meet you.
Those new homes, condos and apartments will and do have students. Those in ninth through 12th grade will have a new high school to attend, when what is currently called “AAA High School” opens for the 2026-27 school year.
The Osceola County School District held a ceremonial groundbreaking on a blustery Friday morning for the school, being built on a 46-acre footprint off Nova Road about 1.5 miles north of U.S. 192. It will be able to accommodate just over 2,500 students at full build out, with grades 9-11 offered at first, and become the county’s ninth traditional public high school. Tohopekaliga High on Boggy Creek Road was the last to be opened in 2018.
The school, a $184 million district construction project, is being built adjacent to a full new district transportation facility which broke ground 15 months ago and is nearing completion. In fact, the cadence on the high school has been very fast-paced, as outer walls have already come out of the ground and plenty of work was being done on the building on Friday.
The school is being built vertically (three stories for the most part) to keep a smaller footprint on the parcel. The buildings will include a classroom building including Administration, Media, and Guidance, an Auditorium, a cafeteria and instructional unit, gymnasium with locker rooms, a central plant, concessions for the sports facilities, equipment storage and a greenhouse/shadehouse.
There will be separate parent and bus drop-off loops—the parent queue will be able to double stack cars on site—with aluminum-covered canopies, along with approximately 777 parking spaces.
The school will help with overcrowding at Harmony and St. Cloud High Schools. An official name—AAA High School, while not catchy, will have to do for now—first principal and a student zone are still a ways out from being confirmed, Osceola County School District Superintendent Mark Shanoff said Friday.
“Unique is what we do now, and we have to be unique,” he said. “The county is rapidly growing, moving students and families in at a record pace. We need to create more school buildings. That involves high schools, and they are typically the crown jewels in a school district. This school will be exactly that for us.”
He said the look won’t be that of a traditional high school.
“That’s what we were kind of going for,” Shanoff said.
District Chief Facilities Officer Dave Sharma said when he sees a project like this, he sees students of multiple generations forging a future, so the physical place needs to foster that.
“When you see something like this on paper, two to three years out, and then it’s coming to fruition, I sometimes get in awe of what our Facilities team is able to do to bring something like this to life,” he said. “This is more of an urban, college-like campus. We get to give the students and residents of this part of Osceola County an amazing facility that will have a longterm effect.”
Patrick Rauch, a principal for designer Schenkel-Shultz, said the unique challenge comes from part of the site being on a flood plain.
“We’ve literally gone back to the drawing board to think of a more creative way to make this happen. Sometimes that forces you to be more creative and innovative, and the design we came up with is more dynamic and creative, which is a benefit to the project.”
Construction work is ongoing, about to or has been completed all over the district. A new K-8 school in Kindred is slated to open in August, and notable renovations are under way at Osceola County School for the Arts. K-8 schools in Sunbridge and along North Poinciana Boulevard opened this school year.
