OCPS moves to buy land for high school

The Orange County School Board plans to purchase more than 61 acres of undeveloped land in south Orlando as a site for a new high school, a campus that would relieve crowding at Lake Nona High School and serve new residential development in the area.

The board agreed to the $11.5 million purchase at its Tuesday meeting. The board wants the new high school to open in 2025 but may try for a year earlier, if its budget allows.

The property, now part of the Meridian Parks development, sits on land that was part of the former Pinecastle Jeep Range, which was used by the U.S. Army Air Corps to train bombardiers during World War II.

The new high school site, however, is not on a section of property with any old munitions or explosives, experts have told the board.

The new school, once open, would be Orange County Public School’s 23rd traditional high school. OCPS now has 20 high schools, with the new Horizon High School and Lake Buena Vista High School slated to open in August.

The new school would relieve Lake Nona, which now has 650 more students that it was built to accommodate and sits in one of the county’s fastest-growing areas.

In 2007, the Army Corps of Engineers announced it had found a live bomb on the old military range, behind Odyssey Middle School, which opened in 2001. The middle school and more than 4,000 homes and businesses had been built on the northern fringe of the bombing range.

During a subsequent two-year cleanup operation, the Corps unearthed more than 400 bombs, rockets and grenades as well as tons of munitions debris left on or near the school property and in the developments of Vista Lakes, Crowntree Lakes and Tivoli Woods.

The findings scared and angered residents and prompted more than a dozen lawsuits against developers and engineers.

But a 2015 investigation found no evidence of munitions on the property where the new high school would be built — part of what was called Starwood until it was renamed Meridian Parks. Another report in 2019 also found nothing that would prevent development on the land.

The property is owned by Beachline South Residential, LLC. In addition to the sale price, the development company will also pay more than $174,200 to help the school district build a “buffer wall” along the site’s boundary that is a “adjacent to a proposed high-speed rail,” the documents said.