Less than halfway to its August 2025 finish date, the new Waco High School is progressing from dreams and blueprints to the physical shape of roofs, walls and hallways.
Much of the interior work lies ahead, but a walk-through tour given Monday to the media and Waco ISD Foundation members provided views of cavernous interiors, vistas of a central outdoor courtyard and dozens of framed spaces ready to turn into classrooms and labs.
John Eggeling, senior project manager for main construction contractor Rogers-O’Brien, and architect Andrew Faust with architectural firm O’Connell Robertson led the tour group from the Trice Avenue side of campus to the Colcord Avenue side.
The $159 million high school is the largest and most complex of the four new schools covered in a $355 million bond issue that voters approved in 2021 and is scheduled to open to students and faculty by fall 2025. G.W. Carver Middle School, part of that bond package, opened last fall, and Tennyson Middle School is weeks away from completion. A new Kendrick Elementary School and expanded South Waco Elementary School, also in the bond project, will open the same year as Waco High.
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The tour started where the new entrance for the performing arts center and gymnasiums will be and ended where the high school’s main entrance will face. It roughly followed a main Lions Way, a central hallway tying together the two-story classroom wing, central cafeteria and library areas and the fine arts, sports and career and technical education wing.
The direction also started where the most visually impressive work has been done, the performing arts center wing that dominates the campus under construction.
Eggeling and the small tour group stood on the floor of an enormous space that will house some 600 seats, an orchestra pit, performing stage and a sound and lighting booth. Catwalks to access lighting and theater rigging crossed the space almost three stories above the stage.
“The most complicated part of the entire building (the high school) is right here,” he told them.
The center, its surrounding practice rooms and music and art classrooms take one-third of the structural steel used in the new high school, Eggeling said.
The roofs and exterior walls for the high school’s main building and wings are finished with most of the approximately 200 workers on site starting to prepare the interiors. Concrete floors covered in dust, puddles from rainwater blown in through open window frames, and construction lighting dangling from cables all indicate the high school remains a work-in-progress.
With second floors now in place, visitors could imagine vistas for a future group of students, teachers and staffers: a look from above of a central courtyard between wings, where students can meet and eat; and a classroom view of passing New Road traffic.
Providing a gently curving path from the high school’s lower classroom level and the outdoor courtyard to Lions Way is what has been labeled the “Monumental Staircase,” a piece of poured concrete engineering which Rogers-O’Brien project leaders quietly but proudly point out to visitors.
On the way from the Colcord Avenue front entrance back to the beginning, the tour passes the high school’s two gymnasiums, located across from the performing arts center, and accompanying weight and locker rooms — the latter large spaces will house what once was in the high school’s detached fieldhouse.
When finished, the new 370,000-square-foot Waco High School will offer the capacity for 2,132 students.