Jun 11, 2024
"It's going to affect generations of students."
With ownership recently secured, Ector County ISD leaders took the opportunity to celebrate the purchase of the land for a new middle school and a new Career & Technical Education (CTE) high school. The signs announcing “The Future Home of…” went up Tuesday morning (June 11) and joining Superintendent Dr. Scott Muri were a few school board members, central office administrators and a couple of the leaders of the Bond 2023 political action committee.
“Today is a huge milestone,” said Dr. Muri. “I think back several years, and these were dreams. Today it’s real. We own the property, we’ve started the design process, the journey is well underway."
The new middle school will be built on 42 acres on S. Tripp Avenue and will be the first middle school outside of Loop 338. The cost of the land was $800,000. It will be about 170,000 square feet and serve approximately 1,000 students. A committee of community members is already working with the architecture firm on the design. Ground-breaking is planned for January 2025 with the projected opening date of August 2026.
“It’s still a little surreal,” said Kevin Searcy, a west Odessa resident himself, who served as a volunteer on the bond planning committee and co-chaired the political action committee that supported the bond. “You can’t really see it but we know the square footage and we know how many kids will be served. It starts to feel like a reality now.”
The land for the new CTE facility is in the industrial park on E. Murphy Street. The 37+ acres, worth about $2.8 million, was generously donated to ECISD by Grow Odessa for this project. The CTE center will be the home high school for 400 students, with about 2,000 more traveling to the facility each day for CTE classes. In partnership with Odessa College, it will be available on nights and weekends for job training for adults, too. Groundbreaking for the CTE center is also planned for January 2025 with the projected opening date coming in 2027.
“It’s a celebration, really, for kids,” said Dr. Muri. “It’s going to affect generations of students. I feel a lot of excitement and pride for our community.”