A new high school in Oregon is positioned as a K-12 design model

Key Takeaways:

•This 300,000-sf replacement high school in Beaverton, Ore., is a design model for resilience and sustaiinability.

•The old school will be razed to make way for parking.

The Portland suburb of Beaverton, Ore., is replacing a 100-year-old high school with what is being dubbed as this city’s most ambitious K-12 project to date: a three-story, 300,500-sf building whose $221 million construction is the costliest of the projects being funded by a $753 million bond passed in May 2022.

The new high school is slated to open in the fall of 2026. Tyler Martens, a project manager for Skanska, the building contractor on this project, told the Valley Times newspaper that the existing high school—which is the oldest still-in-use public high school in the state—will be demolished and that site will become parking lots.

The total cost of the replacement high school, including design, permitting, and project management, is $253 million.

Future-ready classrooms

Beaverton’s school district is positioning the new high school—which will support a 1,500-student capacity—as a national model for K-12 design that prioritizes resilience, sustainability, student experience and cost-effective construction. (The project’s AOR is Portland, Ore.-based BRIC Architecture and its designer is Walker Macy.) For one thing, the school is being built to a higher-than-required seismic standard. Integrated seismic joints allow structural independence between building segments, enhancing safety during seismic events—now visible and accessible for coverage. (KPFF is this project’s structural engineer.)

The high school will be future-ready, with learning spaces that include CTE classrooms with built-in infrastructure for career training; a black box theatre featuring acoustic cedar cladding; a natural light–optimized gymnasium with a second-level track; and a pottery room, yoga studio, and breakout study zones.

Other amenities at the new Beaverton High School include an enclosed student courtyard, an indoor running track that circles the upper level of a new gymnasium, and a student health clinic. The school’s athletic fields are being upgraded with new turf recently installed on the football field. New tennis courts are being built. 

The school’s safe and secure design calls for a single controlled entry point, strategic access restrictions, and zero access to an adjacent busy thoroughfare, Farmington Road.

The District is building this school at a time when Beaverton is experiencing a lull in its growth. According to the World Population Review, Beaverton’s population declined by just under 1% to a projected 96,568 in 2025 from 97,510 in 2020.