(Seguin) — Construction officially gets underway this week as Southwest Preparatory School prepares for a new high school in Seguin.
Although the new addition to the campus will include space for both high school classrooms and a cafeteria, officials say the new building will be the foundation for their first official cohort of high school seniors.
Southwest Preparatory School-Seguin is an open enrollment, tuition-free, public charter school, which serves grades Pre-K through 12.
School Principal Dana Fornabaio says with enrollment continuing to grow, it has prompted the charter school to try to keep up with its facility needs here in Seguin.
“Since we have started here, this campus is one of our district campuses for Southwest Prepatory District. This is one of our newer ones and we have since I believe we are going on our eighth here at this campus, so we had started slowly adding on after elementary grade levels – the middle school and then the high school. So, next year will be our first year having our senior class of 12th graders. With that being said and just kind of over the past two years with implementing a lot of new different programs such as Capturing Kids Hearts and just the overturn of how we have been with our curriculum and the fact that we are a smaller class – classroom sizes – two per teacher ratio and we have a lot of interventions on our campus as well as tutors to give that extra support as well as a lot instructional assistance here,” said Fornabaio.
Southwest Prep last week broke ground for the new school building to be built at its current site, located at 2400 E. Walnut Street.
Fornabaio says its primary focus was to keep up with those growing numbers at the secondary level.
“Our idea for this new building that we are going to be doing. Demolishing of the old little piece (began) on Saturday. It’s two floors so it’s going to be kind of a multi-use building but on the second floor is where all of our high schoolers will be housed and then on the first floor is where we will have our cafeteria and other office space and things of that nature but the reason we are building a new two story building is because we want to give our high school kiddos their own space because we are a pre-k through 12th grade,” said Fornabaio.
More importantly, Fornabaio says the new building is vital to continuing their classrooms with a small student-teacher ratio.
“We are excited to be able to provide our students with more of their own personal space especially with our high school kids and they are still going to be in that small classroom setting and getting a lot of that one on one. We are going to have that one-on-one technology. It’s going to be very innovative so just being able to provide them those opportunities from the larger districts to come on in and have this kind of other family-oriented community, I think it’s going to be a really great year, so we are excited,” said Fornabaio.
The expansion of Southwest Prep is only the first of many plans that have been put into motion. Campus leaders say providing a great and safe learning environment is that first step.
“Eventually at the end of the day, we want to make sure our kids are getting the best opportunities possible. We are also going to start in this upcoming fall semester when school starts, we are starting our dual enrollment so that students can start receiving their college credit. Eventually, we want to become an early college high school. This is probably going to be just because of the space that we have – the most expansion that we are going to be able to do on the land that we have here so this will be it for this actual space for our pre-k through 12th grades,” said Fornabaio.
Weather permitting, construction on the new Southwest Prep high school building is expected to be completed in time for the first day of school scheduled for Aug. 14.