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Osceola County School District officials and transportation employees broke ground Tuesday on the site of its new St. Cloud facility on Nova Road. PHOTO/KEN JACKSON -
The new facility will include 41,000 square feet of administrative space and room to maintain, wash and fuel 200 school buses. PHOTO/KEN JACKSON
Explosive growth in Osceola County’s east side means many more families now or will be living in St. Cloud and points east. That’s more students to put in class — and get them from home to campus.
A new high school, projected to open in the fall of 2026, will be built on Nova Road about a mile north of U.S. Highway 192. On an adjacent plot of land, the Osceola County School District is also building a new transportation facility. Leaders broke ceremonial ground on it Tuesday.
The facility will be able to house 200 buses on site and have 12 maintenance bays, a full refueling and bus wash depot, facilities for drivers and staff and 41,000 square feet of administrative space.
As it will be built pre-fabricated and delivered on site to lower cost and build time, it is expected to be ready for buses, drivers and members of the district’s transportation administrative team in about a year. It will be paid for, officials said, by the half-penny sales tax voted in in 2016.
“These are projects that are needed as we continue to grow,” Osceola school superintendent Mark Shanoff said Tuesday. “What’s unique about this is being able to delivering transportation by de-centralizing. We know in east Osceola County, we’re experiencing record growth, in a county experiencing record growth for the country. For us to get ahead of that and provide a space to launch and receive buses and maintain them in the same place they’re going to serve will be valuable, to assure they’ll be on-time (for school), which delivers a value to families.”
The idea, said district 5 School Board member Erika Booth, is to reduce travel times and increase efficiency for east-side routes.
Arby Creach, the district’s transportation director, said this facility has been a long time coming, and the same issues that slowed the starting process quickened it this year — finally getting permits that would expire in the coming months. Another similar site is slated for the Poinciana area to serve the west side of the county. Currently, all operations work out of a single county transportation hub on Simpson Road. That’s where a huge hiring push occurred earlier this year to fill routes; Creach said 20 more routes were created this school year and all are filled, and when the new facility is built those on the east side of town will have a shorter commute to pick up their bus,
“It’s been a long time coming. I can’t tell you what this means, not just for us but our drivers,” he said. “For those who’ve been patient, they’ll understand what this will mean for the area, and the services we can provide economically.”
