Construction continues for Harvest Preparatory Academy’s new San Luis campus, located at San Fernando Street and 20th Avenue, but the official opening date will be a little later than expected – January 2027.
In May 2025, the school broke ground on the new $30 million facility with plans to open at the beginning of the 2026-2027 school year. That date is now being pushed back due to unexpected technicalities.
“First off, it takes months and months just to get the soils reports and the geology and is there a spotted lizard running across the property?” said David Garrison, project manager. “And that’s not a joke. There’s a lot of reports that have to be done just to let us build.
“The other thing we got hit with is down at the intersection at E right by the hospital, they weren’t going to issue us a permit until we agreed to pay a portion of a traffic light, which is $143,000 that they claim that we're 53% of the traffic.”
But progress is being made, Harvest says.
HPA co-founder and executive director Debi Ybarra told KAWC the school was expecting to have its plans back from the City of San Luis on Friday, June 5, after which they’ll be ready to move dirt.
Garrison also noted in a public meeting that prefabricated buildings are also in the process of construction. HPA is expecting them to arrive on June 17.
“It might not look like we were doing anything, but we've been doing a lot and we've spent a lot of money,” he said. “We already have the buildings being made. We already have air conditioners ordered.”
Funding for the new campus is coming from HPA’s general funds and newly acquired loans. Ybarra said the school is using a construction loan from a bank and may later convert that debt into a bond if it’s financially advantageous.
But why a new campus? Ybarra said it’s to provide more opportunities as south Yuma County grows.
“It's really growing out here — Comité de Bien Estar, Riedel Construction,” she said. “And there are big things that are going on out here — lots of homes, especially right around where we're building and that they're slated for, I want to say, it was 1,500 east of Avenue E that are slated out there. So it's a growing area.”
Ybarra said the new campus will benefit from the STORM reading and writing curriculum they currently use in both campuses from Storm Educational Enterprises, which is run by HPA governing board member Wilda Storm.
“That's going to help build up this campus, and we're bringing more sports to this campus because there's going to be fields there,” she said. “So that's going to increase. We're actually increasing that even this year; we're adding a wrestling team and we're adding wrestling club teams to the campuses. So it's just going to build overall just more enhancement for the kids.”
According to the presentation Garrison and Ybarra gave in May, the campus will also have football and soccer fields, plus “the largest playground in all of Yuma County.”
When asked if there are plans to eventually expand the new campus to a high school, Ybarra said they’re looking at it, but high schools are expensive.
“You have to have the right number of students, so as we build — and it'll be perfect because we're having record numbers in the eighth grade and the campuses, so we're ripe to do that,” she said.
The next direction HPA is interested in taking in regards to high school students is offering more career and technical education.
Ybarra said it was hard for her to accept that some students aren’t collegebound or interested in college, “but as the years go on and you acclimate and learn your students, we realize that we need to start offering more things in that department and are looking at partnering the community to do that.”
HPA is looking to repurpose its current San Luis campus as a space for CTE once the new facility is open for instruction.
And should they wish to expand the new campus to include high school, their facility has space for a second story.
“We could also put a high school there,” Ybarra said.
The new TK-8 campus is expected to open January 2027, in the middle of the school year. As the opening approaches, Harvest is already looking to boost enrollment. Ybarra told parents at the campus update meeting in May that they can get $150 for every student they recruit.
One community member’s response at that meeting reflected some of the excitement HPA’s San Luis families are feeling.
“Debi is inviting us to be part of the effort to increase enrollment and build up the student body,” said a woman at the meeting, who did not specify her name, speaking in Spanish. “I’m offering myself, and you don’t have to pay me. I’m offering myself to hand out flyers. I’m offering myself to volunteer.
“Debi, you don’t have to pay me anything. Because what we’ve received from Harvest can’t be repaid. It’s so much more than money. It’s from the heart — and that’s worth much more.”
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Reporting for this article is supported by a grant from the Arizona Local News Foundation.
