Duval County parents push back on 1,200-seat Venetia Elementary expansion<\/a><\/p>\nThe conditions<\/p>\n
That approval came with conditions. <\/p>\n
The committee is recommending a traffic study to address concerns about ingress and egress in the area of Roosevelt Boulevard and Timucuan Road before the project moves forward.<\/p>\n
How the plan got here<\/p>\n
The plan has been revised several times.<\/p>\n
Back in September, the school board originally discussed housing up to 1,200 students, but after significant public pushback, that number was reduced to 840.<\/p>\n
Even at that capacity, traffic patterns in the surrounding neighborhood have remained a top concern.<\/p>\n
The district has already voted to consolidate Ortega Elementary into Venetia at the end of the 2027-2028 school year.<\/p>\n
Combined, the two schools would serve around 814 students.<\/p>\n
Staff also suggested several alternative locations for the school, including John Stockton, Timucuan, Ortega, Bay View, Fishweir and Sadie T. Tillis elementaries, but officials say none of those sites were suitable due to size and other factors.<\/p>\n
City of Jacksonville Council Member Rahman Johnson says Venetia Elementary has generated a lot of community response.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve gotten hundreds of calls, emails, text messages, carrier pigeons, whatever you say about Venetia. A lot of people don\u2019t want the school to go and they also don\u2019t want it to be as large as it\u2019s preslated to be, even though the capacity was decreased down to 840 students. A lot of them said, hey, we just don\u2019t want that either. So right now we\u2019re in that place of figuring out what to do,\u201d Johnson said.<\/p>\n
The committee\u2019s recommendation will now go before the school board for a final decision.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by WJXT News4JAX – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2013 Plans to rebuild Venetia Elementary School in Jacksonville are moving forward, but not without some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443011,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1040,113,116,118,117],"class_list":["post-443010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-dcps","tag-education","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}