Cleveland Independent School District has officially began transitioning into its new administration building, located on S. Houston Street adjacent to Cleveland Middle School and Cleveland High School.
The new 51,000-square-foot administration office is the final project of a $198 million bond voted in by taxpayers in 2019. Other projects in the bond were the new Santa Fe Middle School, Santa Fe Elementary, the new baseball/softball complex, and improvements to the old Northside Elementary campus.
Originally estimated at $13 million, construction costs for the new administration office came in at nearly $21 million due to inflation. Despite the hike, Cleveland ISD managed to shoulder the additional expenses through cost-savings from other bond projects and funds drawn from the general fund.
Superintendent Stephen McCanless, who was named to his position in 2021, oversaw the conclusion of the project that was initiated by previous administrations. McCanless said the new administration office will centralize staff while also freeing up spaces and buildings used by those departments until now, and has a new boardroom and meeting room for Cleveland ISD school board meetings.
The old administration office, located at 316 E. Dallas St., will soon be offices for the District’s Special Education Department, which was previously housed in a portable building near the high school campus, behind Wells Fargo Bank. The portable building can now be used for classroom space, which is sorely needed by the District as the student enrollment has now reached 12,104, a figure that grows weekly as new developments and homes continue to pop up within the District.
McCanless has already heard some of the criticism regarding the new administration building, but he said the District had no choice but to finish projects that were included in the $198 million bond.
“When voters pass a bond and they commit the funds to be used for certain projects, we can’t use it for anything else. You are breaking the law if you spend it any other way,” he explained.
He wants Cleveland ISD taxpayers to know that the District worked hard to trim expenses. McCanless trimmed 12,000 square feet from the original design by making administration offices for himself and others nearly half the size they were originally.
“It’s brand new and when things are brand new people will want to think, ‘Wow, that’s very fancy,’ but it’s not over-the-top. All of the furniture in the building is not the best and most expensive nor is it the least expensive because then we would be replacing it soon,” he said. “It’s mid-level office furniture that fits within our budget.”
The new administration building also provides 7,000 feet of professional space for the District to host gatherings for the Texas Education Agency Region IV, Leadership of East Texas, Lead Forward (an educational consulting company, which helps districts with data and testing), and training seminars for teachers.
The meeting rooms are designed so that they can be divided into multiple spaces with some having drop down walls with dry-erase dividers.
Even though staff will be completely moved into the building by next week, the last touches are still be finished. On Monday, contractors still needed to hang a big “C” in the foyer and install a vinyl mural that will adorn one wall in the main hallway, and items still need to be put on display in the District’s museum, located just off the main foyer next to reception.
While the students are still in temporary classrooms