To celebrate the start of the first of four phases of campus modernization, district and campus officials gathered with students from second-period CTE classes on May 5 for a groundbreaking ceremony in the MAC. The ceremony comes three years after voters after McCallum was designated to receive $66.5 million for modernization after voters approved the 2022 Austin ISD bond.
During the ceremony, student body president Kalliope Haltom spoke on behalf of future students who stand to benefit from the modernization. Principal Andy Baxa, superintendent Matias Segura and Board of Trustees president Lynn Boswell outlined what the modernization entails and how it will benefit McCallum students. Sophomore Riley Pita sang the school song, accompanied by Jeff Rudy on the piano, and junior Noble Pierce recited a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem, “The Seedling.”
The original plan to conclude the ceremony with a groundbreaking on the site of the new building with CTE students shoveling the dirt where the building will be was abandoned due to rain; instead, the students posed on the MAC stage for a photo.
Phase 1 of the modernization plan will include the construction of a completely new three-story science and CTE building. The district hopes that the building will open in January 2027. Segura said that as soon as the design process finishes, which will happen soon, construction will begin immediately, with multiple projects happening at McCallum simultaneously.
“You will have the security in the front occurring, that’ll be mostly done in the summertime to have that done before the school year starts,” he said. “You’ll see the track and the fields go under construction: that’s a bit of a longer time period, and the biggest project of all is the three-story academic wing. That’ll take the duration of the time, so really from now until all the way through 2027.”
Career and Technical Education department chair Audrea Moyers, who has served on the Campus Architectural Team planning the modernization, explained what the new building will mean to science and CTE students.
“Areas like CTE, where we have computer labs and a lot of equipment, as well as science where there’s a lot of equipment, are particularly at a disadvantage in our old building,” Moyers said. “Having lab space to experiment with science rooms that are fully functional and then all of the career and technology is just a huge advantage. We don’t get any additional classrooms out of it, but the classrooms we get are larger and state of the art.”
While the new building is going up, the campus will remain open and students will attend school in the parts of the old building unaffected by the first phase of construction. In order to do a complete demolition and rebuild of a new school, project leaders organized the modernization into phases.
In order to figure out what happens during each phase, Segura said that designers and the campus architectural team considered what parts of the buildings are in the worst shape and what programs needed the most support and renovations in order to succeed.
“We have an idea even before the bond is passed,” he said. “When the voters said they were going to come out and raise $2.4 billion for AISD, we kind of already had a sense of where we were going to focus, but we didn’t have the details. The details are what’s been figured out over the last 18 months with your principal, teachers and campus architectural team, figuring out what needs to get done.”
Moyers has been a regular at the campus architectural team meetings that have occurred monthly and even sometimes every two weeks to determine campus needs within the currently available budget. Moyers said she is hopeful that taking the first step toward modernization will demonstrate why voters should support the rest of the modernization by approving future bonds.
“I hope that because phase one modernization will have happened that the next time a bond comes around, we’ll be considered for phase two, which is really the big phase,” Moyers said. “Part of the planning process was not just this building but the whole complete renovation of the campus because you have to plan it all together and so it’s a four-phase modernization, and phase two is the big one and if we could get approved for that because we’ve started the process that would be great for the whole campus.”
