OKEECHOBEE COUNTY, Fla. — You can hear it in the air and feel it on campus at Okeechobee High School.
“This is my favorite time of the year,” Ken Keller of WOKC radio said.
Keller is the voice of Brahmans football and knows firsthand the importance of practice and what it will mean for the fall.
“You got that excitement of a new season, you got that hope, everybody is undefeated that sort of thing,” Keller said.
Across the Okeechobee County School District, a new year will bring new changes. Numbers, installed this summer, will now identify each building at all 10 schools in the county to add safety for first responders.
“Now when you walk on our campuses, or you come to our campus, you are going to know exactly where [building] 8 is," Dylan Tedders, assistant superintendent, said. "You’re going to know where 9 is.”
Truckloads of dirt by the hour are pouring a new landscape for 1,700 students who will soon call these classrooms home during the day. An aging infrastructure finally took its toll and years of logistics, locally and statewide, to get funding finally just broke ground.
The $82 million project will elevate Okeechobee County into the future of education, and the new high school will literally sit four feet higher to keep problems of the past in the past.
“We've been up here several nights, even when I was an administrator, pulling water out of building 4,” Tedders said.
No school year can begin without school supplies, which around this region are critical.
“In our eyes it’s not an option, because we have so many families that are struggling especially with the increased cost of housing, the increased cost in food,” Leah Suarez, executive director of Our Village Okeechobee,” said. “I think we're going to see way more need than we have ever seen in years past.”
The nonprofit has been raising money and just handed out $20,000 in free school supplies for the ninth year in a row. It’s a community that comes together building a sense of pride when the school bell rings for the first time.
“It’s a good thing. I'm an Okeechobee High School graduate, became a teacher in Okeechobee County, administrator on this site, so it’s a big deal,” Tedders said. “It’s a big deal to this community.”
The school is scheduled to open in the 2026-2027 school year. The district has 6,300 students, 800 employees and 10 schools.