The rendering shows the new high school will be located in the southeast corner of the current Monroe Yankee Road campus and a few hundred yards north of Butler Tech’s Natural Sciences campus.
The new high school’s gym will be alongside the northern part of the school, close to Monroe’s baseball field while the classrooms and other learning areas will be primarily concentrated on the southern half of the school.
The structure will consist of a mostly a two-story building – higher for the gym – with the high school’s current, total projected square footage being between 135,000 to 140,000.
“Right now we are working with the architects on the initial designs and making sure we have enough square footage for the number of kids we have and we have all the rooms we need to accommodate all the different programs we have,” said Buskirk.
“We’re looking at initial layout of the building and its location on campus,” he said, adding enrollment projections for the fast-growing district adds some difficulty to calculating space needed for the future high school.
“We need to plan for our expected growth,” said Buskirk of the city schools, which has more than doubled its enrollment to a current 2,850 students since the current 2-12 school building was opened in 2004.
“It’s making sure we don’t open the building and we’re already full but we also don’t want to open the building and have a bunch of empty classrooms that the taxpayers have paid for.”
No action was taken by the Monroe Board of Education’s facility committee on the preliminary design and district officials said a series of public meetings to gather more community input will likely happen during the first half of 2026.
Veteran School Board member Tom Leeds has been on the governing board of the district for 18 years and has seen the school system’s booming growth and subsequent space crunch.
Leeds described Monroe’s need for more classroom and other spaces as “drastic.”
“We don’t have any room at all. If there’s a school closet left, we have a classroom in it.”
“We need to have this new high school so we can offer different classes for our students that we can’t do today. And we’re only going to get bigger with all the new subdivisions popping up all around,” he said.
Monroe school parent Heidi Tarin left the unveiling meeting impressed.
“I really like it and I’m excited about it because it keeps a lot of the things that really makes Monroe Schools special,” said Trian, who likes the idea of keeping the new high school on the district’s central campus.
“It’s definitely needed and I’m excited for the new opportunities for future students.”
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