Desert View Middle School Dragons and Desert View Academy Eagles gathered at an empty dirty lot early Friday morning. The occasion? A groundbreaking ceremony because that lot won’t be empty for much longer.
Located next to Desert View Academy at the intersection of Avenue C and 16th Street, the lot is now the future home of Desert View Middle School’s campus. DVMS Dragons, both current and present, were ecstatic, cheering and clapping loudly at Friday’s ceremony.
“My staff that's been with me for years are like, ‘Finally we're there!’ so they are really excited just to see what we've been working for for so long come out,” said Principal Jayleen Hackmann. “My new staff are excited because they're like, ‘That's going to just be amazing.’ A new school is always great. The students—-my eighth graders are sad because they're going to miss it, but my sixth and seventh graders are just beside themselves as we saw today. The seventh graders are ready for it.”
Hackmann explained that the current DVMS campus is a very small building that no longer suits their needs very well.
“It was initially made almost to look as like a call center kind of look because our kids were more online,” she said. “But we’ve actually switched and it’s more classroom-based now … To make do for the last few years, we’ve had open-air classrooms, which is hard to teach in, and so this building is finally coming where our teachers are going to have classroom doors as we joked about and also, just to make sure we have the space for the students that are coming in.”
DVMS has had other locations, but it’s been situated at the current building since 2006. Now that the school’s student count is where it needs to be, test scores are up and city permits have been figured out, the dream of a new campus is finally coming true.
“I'm excited because I can't wait for the soccer field and all the sports that we get to do!” said Calleigh White, a seventh grader at Desert View.
Hackmann explained the school will have a soccer field, a volleyball area and a basketball court. Science, technology, engineering and math classes will also have “more bells and whistles” in their labs.
Students had their first look at a rendering of the new campus during the groundbreaking ceremony. Two students helped unveil the rendering, and another two soon after helped break the ground soon after. But all middle schoolers got to partake in the ceremony in some form—Desert View Schools CEO Rick Ogston had them find branches from the lot and break them.
“You are going to see in the coming months a lot of construction happening, and a huge building going up over there and a lot of green fields over here,” he told them. “It's going to be an exciting time. But you know what? Being a dragon is a lot more than fields and a lot more than buildings. Being a dragon is about the energy that you guys bring every day … It's the energy of excitement, of enthusiasm that [you] bring to this campus, and that's what we're looking for.”
Hackmann shared with KAWC that construction is expected to begin shortly, and they hope to finish the school before August 2026 in order to start the next school year in the new building.
This reporting is supported by a grant from the Arizona Local News Foundation.
