Trucks from Nielsen Builders clear the 90-acre site of the future Fluvanna High School. On April 14, Fluvanna County Public Schools performed a groundbreaking ceremony for the much heralded—but controversial—new facility at Pleasant Grove, along Route 53. BCWH Architects designed the 277,000-square-foot complex to accommodate between 1,500 and 1,750 students.
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Trucks clear the 90-acre site that wil become the new Fluvanna High School. The $56.8-million project has its critics, who say that enrollment needs can be met by renovating the 1976 structure. The new school is slated to be completed by mid-2011. |
Construction is scheduled to conclude by mid-2011, after which the new location will replace the old high school in Palmyra, in use since 1976. The old structure is slated to become the new middle school.
Critics of the project—of its $56.8 million price tag, much of it borrowed—say that the county’s enrollment needs could easily be met by renovating the existing high school at a lower cost. Thomas Muir, the only member of the school board that voted against the project, told C-VILLE that many aspects of the current facility are not suitable for middle school students. “They don’t need a varsity-level football field,” Muir says. “They don’t need two gymnasiums.” Such accommodations would either go to waste or need to be retooled, Muir says, so that “more money will have to be pumped into the existing high school to make it a middle school.”
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