Hendry County Schools officials told parents at a LaBelle town-hall that the district has purchased 80 acres on Helms Road and plans to build a new comprehensive high school expected to serve students beginning in the 2026–27 school year.

Tony Bussing, director of facilities and maintenance, described the property acquisition and the construction timeline: site work was expected to begin in late June or early July, and officials said they hoped to have walls up within a year. “We bought 80 acres on Helms Road,” Bussing said.

Nut graf: The project is the district’s first new high-school construction in about 25–30 years, district leaders said. Officials presented a campus‑reconfiguration plan that moves LaBelle Middle School into the existing LaBelle High School campus, consolidates LaBelle Elementary and Uppner Grove Elementary into one site, creates a pre‑K center at the Uppner Grove location and centralizes district offices on the consolidated campus. The district projected the new-construction price at about $123,000,000.

Swindle said the existing LaBelle High School campus currently serves about 1,400 students in facilities built for roughly 950 and that the campus currently uses about 32 portable classrooms. District staff said the new campus will include CTE (career and technical education) programs and other modern facilities.

Officials described an implementation timeline: construction and site work this summer, continued campus moves when the new high school opens (district staff said those moves could take up to a year), and a planned groundbreaking with board members when school resumes in late August or early September.

The district said bond financing, state facilities programs and local funding will be part of the financing plan; officials gave a project estimate of about $123,000,000 total but did not present a final financing resolution at the town-hall.

Ending: District staff invited the public to attend a planned groundbreaking and said they will continue to share updates on schedules, traffic and impacts to individual schools as the project advances.