St. Johns County School District moves forward with building new K-8 schools

ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. — The St. Johns County school board approved design plans for two K-8 schools it’s hoping to open by August 2026.

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The schools have been in the planning phase, but the district leaders say tonight’s approval allows the district to start the construction process once it finds builders to put them up.

The new schools are two K-8′s, one located in Nocatee and the other in the Silverleaf community. Neither has yet been named, both are set to hold about 1,500 students each.

Aaron Fingerhut has lived in Nocatee, not far from where one of the K-8′s is set to open, since 2018. He has kids at Pine Island Academy, which opened in 2020 and is now already 72 students over capacity.

“This area has really exploded,” Fingerhut says, “especially over the last three years, this area has really grown.”

Fingerhut’s already planning for the chance his kids will be zoned to the new school in Nocatee, being built in part to help balance out capacity at neighboring schools like Pine Island Academy.

“It’s definitely something we’re nervous about, but we have our fingers crossed,” says Fingerhut.

The two new K-8s are part of the district’s plan to build a total of five K-8s between now and 2026, which Action News Jax has been covering for months.

Here’s when the school district says each school will open:

• Trout Creek Academy (K-8): set to open in August; located in the Shearwater neighborhood with a capacity of 1500 students
• Lakeside Academy (K-8): set to open in August; located in the Beacon Lake neighborhood with a capacity of 1500 students
• K-8 School “PP” (not yet named): set to open by August 2025; located in the Rivertown neighborhood with a capacity of 1100 students. The school district says this will eventually convert to a middle school.

But the district says they’ll need more schools than these to help ease the need for them.

“With the growth we’ve had for the last 10 to 15 years, I would really expect us to need a school every year,” says Dr. Brennan Asplen, deputy superintendent of operations for the school district, who’s overseeing the new school projects.

“If we weren’t building these schools, some of our high schools could be four to five thousand in a school right now,” Asplen says.

Right now, at least 10 of the district’s 51 schools are over capacity. Asplen says since each costs about $68 million to build, the district doesn’t have the money it needs to both construct the schools to meet the number of students moving into the county and hire the staff to support them.

“You can’t build a school if you don’t have the dollars, even though you need the school because you have the students,” says Asplen.

Apart from the new K-8′s, the district says it’s planning to open another K-8 school, an elementary school, and a high school by 2029, meaning the district expects to open a total of at least 8 new schools by 2030.

The school district has already updated its attendance zone changes for the 2024-2025 school year ahead of the new school opening. They show which school your student(s) will be assigned to next year, which you can find out by clicking the link here.

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