UVALDE, Texas — The Uvalde CISD board approved the schematic plans for the district’s replacement for Robb Elementary School on Monday night, setting a timeline in motion to open the school in the 2025-26 school year.

What You Need To Know

  • The Uvalde CISD board on Monday approved schematic plans for the replacement of Robb Elementary School. A mass shooting took place at the elementary on May 24, 2022

  • The $60 million project will be set on a 23-acre site; at two stories and 120,000 square feet, the yet-to-be-named campus will dwarf the prior Robb Elementary

  • The front doors of the new campus will open into a safe contained vestibule area for visitors before they enter the campus hallways; the campus also will have door locks, security cameras, bullet-proof glass and door-prop alarm

  • The timeline has set mid-summer as the time for groundbreaking, with 18 months of construction before the campus will be ready to open

The $60 million project will be set on a 23-acre site. At two stories and 120,000 square feet, the yet-to-be-named campus will dwarf the prior Robb Elementary, which also served only grades 2-4. The campus will have 12 classrooms per grade level, an air-conditioned gym and STEM classrooms.

“We wanted to build a school that was not only beautiful, but that would also and that would be something that our community would be proud of,” said Natalie Arias, who co-chairs the community committee that has assisted in designing the school. “We also, of course, reviewed the district’s mission beliefs and objections through all of this work to make sure that we were aligning our work with your goals.”

The Uvalde CISD Moving Forward Foundation is spearheading fundraising for the campus. To date, the foundation has raised about 70% of the $60 million goal. The Charles Butt Foundation and the Charles Butt Family have contributed $10 million toward the goal and have provided a board president and executive director for the nonprofit foundation.

The presentation of the campus on Monday night emphasized that campus design would be “safe, but not institutional.” The campus will have a safe perimeter, as well as indoor space for physical education and recess. The campus will include dedicated classrooms for science, music and art.

The front doors of the new campus will open into a safe, contained vestibule area for visitors before they enter the campus hallways. The campus also will have door locks, security cameras, bullet-proof glass and door-prop alarms, which might have prevented the massacre last May.

“We have some safety decisions that we’re still working through with the district,” said Kerri Brady of the architecture firm Huckabee. “And there will naturally be some things that are included in the design that we will likely never talk about. Those will be coordinated with the district. But we want to balance transparency with confidentiality, and be very delicate around the topic.” 

Early in the planning process, Uvalde CISD said campus construction could be completed by October 2024. Now the timeline has set mid-summer as the time for groundbreaking, with 18 months of construction before the campus will be ready to open.