School district moves forward with alternative site for Nocatee K-8

St. Johns County School District officials are going with a different site for their next K-8 academy in Nocatee.

Last month, the school board was presented with a potential site off of Crosswater Parkway and Bluewater Drive, called the Coastal Oaks site after the adjoining neighborhood.

But the site poses multiple challenges, including wetlands that would have to be mitigated to the tune of $300,000, and a large retention pond that would have to be moved.

Because the school site was originally designated for a much smaller elementary school, there’s not much room to work around those issues. If the wetlands were not mitigated, the district would have to redesign the school entirely — delaying the project and adding hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The school district is in a hurry to get the new academy opened for the 2021-2022 school year because neighboring Palm Valley Academy is near capacity. Enrollment grew by 26% in one year alone, and the district is worried about running out of seats if a new academy isn’t built right away.

“We believe this is the right way to utilize Coastal Oaks, but we believe we don’t really have the time to do it at this point,” said Nicole Cubbedge, the district’s executive director for planning and governmental relations, during a workshop Tuesday.

After hearing about the challenges associated with the Coastal Oaks site, school board members instructed district staff to go back and exhaust all options for a better site.

There are three sites that Nocatee developers set aside for future schools in the development, including the Coastal Oaks site.

But the other two — in the southern end of Nocatee — have no paved roads leading to them yet. The developer said they weren’t planning to start construction on an extension of Crosswater Parkway until after 2021, but now they’ve reconsidered.

They’re offering to construct the extension while the school is being built. The district will now be able to build on a 25-acre donated site off of Pine Island Road, which is currently a dirt road used for construction.

Right now the site sits empty aside from a forest of pine trees. It’s all uplands, so the district won’t have to mitigate any wetlands, and the shape is ideal for a K-8 site, Cubbedge said. They’ll be able to put the same academy design that they used on Palm Valley, saving time and money.

Several residents of the Coastal Oaks neighborhood came out to Tuesday’s workshop to voice their opposition to putting a K-8 off on Bluewater Drive. They cited concerns about traffic and losing green space.

“We were misled by Nocatee itself and our developer because there was no mention of a school being built in that area,” said Coastal Oaks resident Jim Archer. "I surely wouldn’t have built the corner lot in a gated community with a lot of preserve and quiet if I knew a K-8 school was going to be going there.”

But Superintendent Tim Forson made it clear that with the rate of growth Nocatee is experiencing, that site will eventually be a school. He said there’s still some risk with the Pine Island site, and any delay could prevent the school from opening on schedule.

“There are times when you have to construct a school in the middle of a dense residential area,” Forson said to the residents. “I say that because my prediction is that at some point in the future, there will be a school built on the Coastal Oaks site.”

Cubbedge said it would be in the district’s best interest to go ahead with mitigating those wetlands for a future site, because that process would be less expensive than redesigning the school.

“We’re not saying this is a bad site, we’re not saying that it can’t be built on, we’re not saying that it won’t be built on,” Cubbedge said. “We’re saying that this site needs time, and right now time is one thing we don’t have a lot of.”