High-school relief coming — in 2022

Orange County Public Schools and Orange County Government have scheduled two informational meetings to inform the community of two new schools planned to relieve overcrowding in Dr. Phillips, Freedom and Windermere high schools.

The first meeting is from 6 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 8, in the Dr. Phillips High School media center, 6500 Turkey Lake Road, Orlando. The relief school for Dr. Phillips and Freedom currently is named 80-H-SW-4. It will be located east of Apopka Vineland Road and south of Fenton Street, at the south end of Smith Bennett Road.

The second meeting is from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 11, at Windermere High School, 5523 Winter Garden Vineland Road, Windermere. The current name of the Windermere relief school project is 113-H-W-4. It will be built on land south of Seidel and east of State Road 429.

Both of these are 10% design meetings; the schools are both at the beginning of the design process. This is the “program verification” stage, in which the architect presents to the community what elements will be part of the new high schools.

Neither presentation will include site plans or designs but will include photos of example spaces and a rough timeline.

Parents can ask questions and offer input before design begins. 

The two schools, needed based on the latest student-enrollment projections, are set to open in 2022. Those projections, when combined with projections for the fiscal resources that will allow OCPS to fund the new schools, were used to determine the school opening dates, according to OCPS. It takes five years to plan, design and build a new high school.