Students prepare for first day at ‘Fort Eastwood,” $93 million transformation underway

Students at Eastwood High may not only have a hard time finding their classes on the first day of school on Monday, they may not recognize their school.

Eastwood High is currently undergoing a $93 million transformation. Students have nicknamed the school “Fort Eastwood.”

One look at the campus and you will understand why. Dozens of portable classrooms line the campus and much of the old school has already been torn down. There is large machinery on campus, heaps of construction debris and fenced off areas.

In 2015, voters in the Ysleta Independent School District approved a record-setting $430 million bond.

The money is being used to renovate schools, upgrade technology and improve athletic fields, but Eastwood will undergo one of the biggest transformations.

Pat O’Neill is chief of operations for YISD.

“Unbelievable the difference. You can stand across the street and you wouldn’t even recognize the building because most of the old building is now gone,” O’Neill said.

The facade on a newer building that faces McRae is being removed and classrooms will be added.

The district held a community meeting on campus Thursday night to try and prepare students and their parents for the new year.

“They have questions like ‘where am I going to go during lunch time. Where am I going to drop my child off. How are kids going to get from one end of the campus to the other?’ So, it’s more logistical questions than anything else and we just want to put their minds at ease,” O’Neill said.

Norma Venegas was at the community meeting. Her 16-year-old son is on the Eastwood swim team.

“I came out first of all to get informed, how the progress is going. You can see it from outside but you can’t really don’t know the inside of it. And secondly is safety,” Venegas said. “Everything is blocked off. Even coming in here you just see areas that are being blocked off. I can just imagine teenagers running around in here.”

After the community meeting, parents and students toured the area. The school will hold another open house on Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Schedules will be up.

More help will offered the first day of school.

“What they are going to do is have administrators, student council out in between each class period with a map showing the kids where to go,” O’Neill said.

The experience will be very different for incoming freshmen. Incoming freshman will take their courses at Eastwood Middle School during the first year of construction, and bus back and forth for extracurricular activities like sports and band.

“All of our ninth graders are over at Eastwood Middle School. But some of them will come over during the day. We want them to have a total high school experience,” O’Neill said.

The school first opened in 1961.

“It’s been years. They have done so well people kind of forget, ‘hey they need a new building,’ because they have succeeded and been successful academically, athletically, fine arts. They have done a great job but we were in dire need of a new building here,” O’Neill said.

It will take about three years for the new Eastwood High School to be completed but some renovations will be finished in about a year.