Boca’s Addison Mizner Elementary won’t move to public parkland

50-year-old facility to get face-lift after public pushback.

Addison Mizner Elementary School will be rebuilt and expanded at its current site after the public pushed back against a pitch to move the school to public Sugar Sand Park.

The Palm Beach County School District decided against moving Addison Mizner, a 50-year-old school on an 11-acre lot at the center of a neighborhood on Southwest 12th Avenue between Palmetto Park Road and Camino Real, School Board member Frank Barbieri said Monday. “That’s the decision the superintendent made,” Barbieri said.

The district decided to rebuild the aging school because “it’s in very bad shape” with a leaky roof and other issues, Barbieri said. The school will expand to serve kindergarten through eighth grade pending approval by the state, Barbieri said.

Building a bigger Addison Mizner school on its current site will leave little to no space for athletic fields and outdoor land, School District officials have said. The school is also at the center of a neighborhood, which often crowds with cars during drop-off and pick-up hours.

The district considered rebuilding the school on 24 acres of unused land at Sugar Sand Park, on Camino Real and Palmetto Park Road across Interstate 95. It’s about a mile west of Addison Mizner. But public pushback — both from some parents of Addison Mizner students and frequent visitors of the popular 132-acre Sugar Sand Park — was swift and overwhelming.

“This puts a lot of concerns to rest,” Mayor Susan Haynie said.

Most of Boca Raton’s public schools enroll more students than they are built to hold, an issue so pressing that the city offered to donate land to the district for a new school.

Don Estridge High Tech Middle School, on Spanish River Boulevard and Military Trail, will take on about 14 acres of city-owned greenery surrounding the school for a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, pending approval by the state Board of Education, Barbieri said. It will be designed to allow it to transform into a kindergarten through eighth grade in the future if needed.

That project is expected to last until at least 2020. The Addison Mizner rebuild likely will last until 2022. During construction, students will temporarily move to the school planned on the land near Don Estridge High Tech.