St. Johns County is going to build a high school in SilverLeaf, and the paperwork for the drawings went to the school board on Tuesday with a lump sum fee of $6,233,469.00 on it.

The school is called High School JJJ, which is the letter code the district uses for a building that does not have a name yet. The district’s own Capital Projects Status Report, on the same agenda, says it is projected to open for the 2029-2030 school year.

Here is what that means for your kid. If your child is in sixth grade this year, the 2029-2030 school year is the year they start ninth grade, which makes them the first class that could walk into this building as freshmen. If your child is in eighth grade now, they will be a junior somewhere else when it opens.

The fee is for design and construction documents, not for the school. PBK Architects Florida, Inc. is the firm, picked at the Sept. 8 board meeting through what the status report calls a reuse contract, and the proposal is dated Aug. 19 and marked revised Oct. 7.

Two of the numbers inside that lump sum are worth pulling out, because they are not about the building at all. The proposal says the fee includes $250,000.00 for on-site civil design and $346,000.00 for off-site civil design by Kimley-Horn, and it says what that second figure buys: scope “for roadway connecting Silver Lake Drive and the school site.” That is the road that gets buses and parents to the front door, and the design of it is $346,000.00 of this fee.

No fiscal impact, and a $6.2 million attachment

The cover sheet the board saw carries a line headed Fiscal Impact. It reads: “No Fiscal Impact.” The document stapled behind it is the proposal carrying the $6,233,469.00 lump sum fee, three pages further into the same packet.

The item is headed Approval of Increased Architectural Scope, which means the fee is a change to something that already existed, and the proposal does not say what the earlier figure was. There is no before number in the packet to set the new one against.

It was submitted by Steve Cade, Executive Director for Facilities and Construction, and Paul Abbatinozzi, Deputy Superintendent, under Superintendent Dr. Brennan Asplen. It sat on consent, alongside the capital projects report, rather than on action. The only Operational Services item the board took as action on Tuesday was the open-enrollment plan.

Not a full EHPA design

One scope bullet in the proposal is about what the building will be rather than what it will cost. It is four lines long. The new school “will meet structural shelter requirements similar to what has been done with past K8 facilities, but not a full EHPA design.”

The proposal does not say what a full EHPA design would add, and it does not define EHPA. Neither does anything else in the 774 pages. The phrase appears once in the packet and then not again.

Florida school buildings are the public shelters in this county when a storm comes, and a parent who reads that sentence is entitled to know which side of the line this one lands on. The document in front of the board on Tuesday does not answer it.

The two documents do not describe the same building

The status report says High School JJJ “will be constructed from the New High School ‘CCC’ (Northeast) design and construction documents.”

The architect’s proposal, in the same packet, says the work is “completion of design and construction documents for the construction of a new High School based on the recent upgrades to the Ponte Vedra High School design.”

Those are two different buildings to copy. Both sentences were written for the same meeting, and the packet does not reconcile them.

Why a high school, and why now

Further down the same consent agenda is an agreement that explains the need in the district’s own words. It does not mention JJJ once. Item V.2 is the school concurrency mitigation agreement for Bartram Grove, 90 single-family and 90 multi-family units south of Race Track Road and west of Interstate 95. The agreement says the homes would generate 38.5 elementary students, 20.5 middle school students and 26.5 high school students. It says capacity is available for the elementary and middle students. It says capacity is not available for the high school students, not in the concurrency service area the homes sit in and not in any area next to it, and that available high school capacity “will not be in place or under actual construction within three (3) years after the approval of the Development Proposal.”

The developer pays $329,860.00 instead. The agreement prices that at $1,833.00 per dwelling unit. The intent in the architect’s proposal is “to bid this project as early in 2027 as possible.” Under construction in 2027 and open in 2029-2030 is what the district is telling two different sets of readers in two documents on the same night.

What the board actually did

That is not in the record yet. The district’s minutes page carries nothing newer than the Sept. 22 workshop. The portal page for Tuesday’s meeting offers an agenda and an agenda packet and no minutes, no action summary and no vote tally. Tuesday’s own agenda shows the pattern: item I.1 that night asked the board to approve the minutes of five meetings held in September.

So the minutes of Oct. 13 go to the next regular meeting, which is 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 40 Orange Street. The Tattler will publish what they say about this item and about item W.1, the open-enrollment plan this paper wrote about on Oct. 11.