Ground is broken for the new Hodgson Vocational Technical High School.
The new Hodgson Vo-Tech should be ready in four years with construction expected to start in two weeks or so.
The new school will be built next to the current facility on the current site of the playing fields. Once it’s completed, the current building will be demolished with new playing fields constructed in that space.
"Someone might actually think, why now? Well, we've been asking for this for quite a while, and we're real excited because now the students will have the opportunity to have classrooms that are necessary size academically as well as within their career programs. But also just have some other things that are very common in schools like a full gym or a full auditorium. So, we're real excited about that," said Joseph Jones is New Castle County VoTech School District Superintendent.
Jones notes they’re excited that students will be able to learn in an environment more conducive to learning.
He says the layout of the current building isn’t very functional.
"This school just never was really equipped for classrooms. In this school, you'll have to go through one classroom at times to get to another classroom,” said Jones. “So you as a student may have to walk through a Social Studies classroom to get to an English classroom, and that's just disruptive. That's one of the reasons why we really needed to change things."
Jones adds the 286,896 square foot building was not expected to cost more than $200 million, but it will because of the increasing cost of materials, especially steel.
