Construction officially began on a new Citronelle High School after Mobile County school officials held a groundbreaking ceremony marking the start of work on a campus that has been years in the planning.
The new school will rise on a roughly 13-acre site directly across from the existing Citronelle High School, bordered by Lebaron Avenue, Highway 45 and Centre Street. Renderings released ahead of the ceremony show a modern facility designed to replace the district’s aging building with updated classrooms and campus infrastructure. Officials set a completion target of summer 2016, giving the district roughly a year and a half to complete the project before students would be able to move into the new building.
The Mobile County school board awarded a $22 million construction contract to White-Spunner Construction late last year to serve as general contractor on the project. The build is being overseen by Hoar Program Management, which is managing roughly $100 million in school construction projects for the district over a two-year span, part of a broader wave of facility upgrades across Mobile County’s school system.
Beyond the high school itself, district officials used the same week to advance plans for a second Citronelle campus project. The school board’s work session included discussion of a proposed lease agreement in which the district would rent about 9 acres from the City of Citronelle to expand Lott Middle School. Under the terms discussed, the district would pay a nominal $1 per acre annually over a 49-year term. If approved, the arrangement would let the district combine the leased acreage with property it has already purchased near the existing middle school, consolidating everything into a single expanded campus.
Local officials framed the high school groundbreaking as part of a broader investment in Citronelle’s public schools, with the middle school expansion representing a complementary piece of that plan. Together, the two projects reflect a push by the Mobile County school system to modernize facilities on the northern end of the county, an area that has seen steady residential growth in recent years.
District officials did not indicate whether any additional construction or renovation projects were planned for the Citronelle area beyond the high school and the proposed middle school lease. For now, attention turns to the new high school site, where crews are expected to begin site work in the coming weeks as the project moves toward its targeted 2016 completion.