Amarillo school superintendent Dana West last week announced that the Amarillo Independent School District would be making use of the former Hastings Distribution Center on Plains Boulevard in Amarillo.
As The Amarillo Globe-News reports, AISD plans to convert the 200,000-square-foot building into a high school academy for science, technology, engineering and math students. It’s not yet known how exactly the academy will operate, or whether it will operate full-time or part-time.
AISD is hoping to recruit 1,000 students to the new facility. The price tag for the remodel project currently stands at $3.4 million—far lower than the $80 to $100 million it would cost to build a new school.
The school district is still considering building a new school sometime in the future, but moving into the Hastings building will put off that necessity for a few years. The building was left empty when Hastings, a major nationwide entertainment retailer formerly based in Amarillo, folded last year.