Some Windermere High parents upset over school’s new off-site football stadium
Windermere High School’s new football stadium — built more than a mile down the road from the campus — is inconvenient and unsafe, providing no shelter during thunderstorms and, with limited parking, no quick way to evacuate students, some parents say.
“Parents want the stadium … at the campus,” said Julie Sadlier, whose daughter is a Windermere ninth-grader. Several years ago, Sadlier helped lead a parent push for the school’s construction, and she is now organizing parents unhappy with the off-site stadium.
Desperate to relieve crowding at jam-packed West Orange High School, the Orange County School Board approved a deal three years ago to build Windermere High without a football stadium on its nearly 66-acre campus.
The school sits on County Road 535 and Ficquette Road, and the stadium is 1.6 miles away.
The Orange County Commission demanded an off-site stadium if the school board wanted its approval to construct the high school in an area designated as a “rural settlement.” The school
board, after a nearly two-year fight with the county over the school’s location, reluctantly agreed.
Windermere High, a $93.5 million project, opened in 2017, providing relief to West Orange, which by then had about 4,200 students on a campus meant for 3,000. The stadium was not ready when the school debuted for students, however, so this football season is its first.
Windermere buses almost everyone — football players, cheerleaders, band members and spectators — from its campus to the stadium on Ficquette Road because there is so little parking at the athletic complex; there’s not even room for cars to pull up and drop off passengers.
If storms roll in, students are told to leave the park that houses the stadium, but they have nowhere to go but onto a curvy, twolane road, Sadlier said.
“It’s not going to be a safe situation,” she added.
Lee Berman, whose son is a ninth-grader in Windermere’s marching band, said she worried about safety — “There’s no coverage if there’s a lightning strike” — but also that the off-site stadium just doesn’t meet a large high school’s needs. She’s been to home games and found there weren’t enough bathrooms, parking spots or seats. The bands from other high schools haven’t attended Windermere’s home games because there was no place for their musicians to sit, she noted.
“The last thing I want to happen, from a community perspective, is for this high school not to be successful,” she said. “Build it where it should have been, on school property, right at the school,” she added. “I haven’t talked with one parent who is not feeling this way.”
Only one other Orange high school, Winter Park High, plays football at an off-site stadium. The other 18 schools have stadiums on their campuses. Winter Park plays at Showalter Stadium, which is owned by Winter Park and offers more amenities than most high school facilities.
At this week’s school board meeting, Chairman Bill Sublette, who said he’s been contacted by Windermere parents, suggested the board pass a resolution in support of an on-site stadium. It wouldn’t be legally binding, but it would let the county commission know the board was interested in reworking the agreement from 2015.
But other board members said no, at least for now.
Board member Pam Gould, whose district includes Windermere High, said it was too soon given that the stadium just opened.
Gould said she’s working with Betsy VanderLey, her counterpart on the Orange County Commission, to solve some of the problems at the stadium, located at Deputy Scott Pine Community Park. They’ve worked to add seating and improve traffic management, for example. She said she hoped seating for away teams’ marching bands could be found, too.
The school held its next home game Friday night against East River High School.
“Play out the season. See what’s solvable and what’s not solvable and then look at the next steps,” Gould said in an interview. “Is it ideal? No. Would I prefer if it’s on site? Of course I would.”
But because both the school board and county commission will get several new members in a few months, there’s no point in starting discussions about altering a legal agreement with people who won’t be in office very long, she added.
VanderLey, who was elected in 2016 after the deal was struck, said she has also heard from parents about the stadium. “I understand the sentiment behind this,” she said.
She plans to ask the county’s legal department about “how you unwind a document such as that” but said she was sure it would not be a simple process.
“There’s a long way to go between here and there,” she said.
Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs, who voted for the 2015 deal, last month won election as chair of the school board. She’ll take over those duties from Sublette in November. She declined a request for an interview but sent a statement saying, “I am aware of the concerns raised by parents regarding the stadium and have asked county staff to evaluate whether any additional safety improvements need to be made to the stadium site.”
Some school board members worried that building a new stadium for Windermere would take up money slated to improve other high schools’ athletic facilities. “There are needs all over the county,” said board member Linda Kobert at the board’s Tuesday meeting.
Others doubted the commission would want to reopen such a divisive fight.
“We can be angry. We can be upset. But the reality is we can’t do a thing. We already made an agreement. And the agreement stunk. And we hated it,” said board member Nancy Robbinson.
Commissioners initially opposed the building of the high school because it was in a “rural settlement” area, and some residents said it it would bring too much noise and traffic to the area. Many parents whose children attended West Orange, however, argued the school was needed and fit in with that rapidly growing section of the county.
Eventually, the commission agreed — but only if the stadium wasn’t on site.
“We spent hours doing this. We fought with county commissioners,” said board member Joie Cadle at the meeting. “These were things we had to compromise on … to build a school for children.”
Sublette said that in 2015 an onsite stadium was “non-negotiable” with county commissioners. The board had spent two years unsuccessfully searching for another site for a west Orange school, so it agreed to the county’s demands in order to get Windermere High open, he said.
It did, however, build the school with room for a stadium on its campus, should the agreement ever be renegotiated.