Jul 13, 2024
Groundbreaking planned for July 2025
One of the centerpieces of the successful 2023 school bond is the new Career & Technical Education (CTE) Center to be built as a full-time high school for 400 students, with another 2,000 students transported every day from New Tech Odessa, Odessa High School, and Permian High School to take CTE classes. The new CTE Center will work in partnership with Odessa College to offer students the opportunity for dual credit, certifications, and degrees as well as be available on nights and weekends as a training center for the Permian Basin’s adult workforce.
A CTE Center Advisory Committee of 27 community members, business leaders, Odessa College and ECISD staff have been at work since the beginning of February gathering ideas, talking with the architects, and offering recommendations for the facility’s design. The committee has now met six times with a seventh planned for late July.
On February 16, a group made a site visit the Career Technical Education Center-Hobbs (CTECH) in Hobbs, New Mexico that opened in 2022. On March 5, the group made a second site visit, this time to Abilene ISD’s LIFT (Leadership & Innovation in Future Technologies) Center.
“The site visits were very beneficial to our work,” said ECISD CTE Executive Director Ryan Merritt. “Both host school districts took time to give us an in-depth tour of their facility and answer our questions regarding their design process, CTE programs, and things they would do differently.
“The site visits provided a good reference point for things we like and, also, ways we might do things differently,” Merritt added.
In addition, the architects from PBK have met with ECISD staff members to gauge the district’s wants and needs for the new CTE high school campus. Those are different for the students attending full-time versus those traveling to the facility for their CTE electives. The discussion has been rich as committee members and staff consider existing designs they have seen, alongside the unique features that will support ECISD’s programs.
The bond allotted $80 million for the new CTE Center which will be located off E. Murphy Street near the intersection with Meadow in the Industrial Complex between I-20 and Business I-20. The 37.9 acres, with a value of about $2.8 million, was gifted to the school district by Grow Odessa. The groundbreaking for the CTE Center is planned for July 2025 with the projected opening date coming in 2027.