The Duval County School Board was scheduled to vote again Monday on a construction agreement to rebuild Venetia Elementary, the same deal it rejected ten weeks earlier after neighbors packed a meeting to complain about traffic and an oversized campus. The proposed agreement covers roughly $2.2 million in early spending and would let a contractor begin preliminary project phases, but it sets no final price for the school and, at more than 100 pages, reportedly does not even specify a student capacity.
A Deal Voted Down Once Already
According to jacksonville.com, the board voted down a preconstruction agreement with STG Contracting Group in September after hearing complaints from dozens of Venetia neighbors about effects on traffic from a school originally planned for up to 1,200 students. District administrators responded by scaling back the project so that it would hold no more than 840 students, the outlet reported. That reduced figure matches what Duval School District Operations Chief Jim Culbert said was presented to a city-school district joint planning committee, though a First Coast News search-result snippet from September 30 had described the revised plan as an 800-student school rather than 840 — a discrepancy the available reporting does not resolve.
Complicating matters further, jacksonville.com reported that the agreement up for reconsideration does not appear to mention either a 1,200- or 840-student capacity anywhere in its more than 100 pages. That omission is central to why neighborhood advocates have pushed for a written commitment preventing the school's size from creeping back up. A follow-up advocacy email dated November 6 argued that without a written amendment, the original 1,200-student project scope remains in place.
Timing Tied to Turnover on the Board
The vote fell at the board's last meeting before three newly elected members, chosen November 3, were set to take office, per jacksonville.com. An earlier advocacy email, dated November 2, had argued that the outgoing board should specify the school's size in a formal action before handing the matter to incoming members, saying neighbors wanted decisions properly documented and planning done right.
The rebuild is meant to replace the original Venetia Elementary, which opened in 1942 and closed after the 2025-2026 school year, with its students moved temporarily to the former Hyde Grove Elementary. The new building is intended to absorb Ortega Elementary students as well; the board approved Ortega's 2028 closing in August, and the district has said both Venetia and Ortega currently enroll fewer than about 750 students each — the enrollment level the district says elementary schools need to begin breaking even on predictable costs, according to jacksonville.com.
Price Still an Estimate, Not a Final Number
Culbert estimated the eventual price would land below $50 million, possibly in the mid- or upper-$40 millions, but cautioned that figure is not final. The district still needs to negotiate a guaranteed maximum price contract for construction, and Culbert said that contract must win board approval by March 2027 to keep the project on schedule to open by summer 2028. He also said building a larger school than currently planned would require returning to the joint planning committee for another round of review.
The Joint Planning Committee had already signed off on moving forward with the 840-student rebuild plan in late October, recommending a traffic study addressing access near Roosevelt Boulevard and Timucuan Road. The Venetia fight sits inside the district's broader, years-long effort to right-size its building inventory, a campaign in which jaxtoday.org reported the Venetia design is meant to serve as a flexible prototype adaptable to between roughly 840 and 1,200 students for future elementary schools districtwide.
That right-sizing push has carried real financial stakes before. A separate eu.jacksonville.com report found districtwide construction cost projections ballooned from $1.9 billion to $3.9 billion by 2023, and noted that the new 930-student Hogan-Spring Glen Elementary ultimately came in at $43.7 million — about $8 million below an earlier estimate after district staff combed through line-item breakdowns. Whether Monday's vote resolved the Venetia capacity dispute, and what the board ultimately decided, was not established in available meeting records as of publication.
