New Gulf Shores High School expected to open in 2026

New Gulf Shores High School expected to open in 2026

Gulf Shores City Council has announced it will begin construction on a high school on a city parcel north of the Intracoastal Waterway this spring and have it ready to accept students by the fall of 2026. When complete, the new high school will clear the way for expanding Gulf Shores Elementary to include the connecting middle school campus and shift middle school students into the current high school. More info: gsboe.org.
Rabren Construction signed the $131 million contract to construct the new high school. Located near the Beach Express. The new school will feature an array of collaborative learning spaces scaled to accommodate class sizes from 20 to 200. The 287,000-square-foot facility will have space for more than 1,000 students when it opens for the 2026 school year and will be built to accomodated future growth that could nearly double that capacity.
Students will be immersed in hands-on learning and leading-edge technology in bio-medical, marine biology, engineering, culinary, and finance labs, maker spaces, art, music production, and broadcast studios. Band, choral, and drama students will hone their skills in dedicated spaces connected to a state-of-the-art performing arts center that will host school and community events throughout the year.
A new Dolphin athletics center will include locker rooms for all varsity and junior varsity teams, two competition-size gymnasiums, tiered meeting rooms, athletic training rooms, coaches’ office suites, and an additional 18,000-square-foot field house complete with an athletic performance center planned to be connected to a covered 100-yard practice pavilion that will provide year-round training opportunities for all Dolphin athletes.
More than six years ago, the Gulf Shores City Council voted to form its own city school system. After A nearly 15-month journey filled with distrust and a lawsuit against three entities by the Baldwin County School System, State Sen. Chris Elliott and Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft stepped in to broker an agreement that allowed Gulf Shores City Schools to open for the business of educating chiddren in August of 2019.