Wimauma Is Hillsborough Schools' Fastest-Growing Zone, and 16 of the District's Next 18 Schools Are Headed South

Wimauma is the largest-growing attendance area in Hillsborough County Public Schools, and with the first day of classes set for Monday, Aug. 10, families in the south county are heading back into buildings that filled up faster than anyone planned for. The district's long-range planning report projects Hillsborough will need 18 more schools over the next 15 years. Sixteen of them belong in the southern part of the county.

That is the arithmetic behind every crowded hallway between Riverview and the Manatee County line. Chris Farkas, the district's chief of operations, has laid out the problem in blunt terms: Sumner High School was over capacity within 18 months of opening. A brand-new high school, full almost immediately.

Buy the land, then stack the schools

The district's response has been to buy dirt while dirt is still available. It picked up 60 acres on Bishop Road and 100 acres on West Lake Drive, and rather than spread those buildings across separate sites, it is putting three schools on the West Lake Drive property as a single educational complex. Farkas has described it as a nontraditional approach the district turns to when land is scarce and the chance to buy comes up.

The first piece is already open. Aquilla J. Morgan High School began classes in August 2025 on the West Lake Drive campus, built for up to 3,500 students. The second piece is going up beside it.

School	Opens	Capacity
Aquilla J. Morgan High	Aug. 2025	Up to 3,500
New Wimauma middle school	Aug. 2027	Up to 1,600
Future elementary	Not set	Not set

The middle school carries a price tag of roughly $72 million and sits on the 87-acre site next to Morgan High. Crews topped out the structure in June, meaning the last piece of the frame is in place. It is still two full school years away from taking students.

What that means for this year

Nothing about the 2027 opening helps a seventh grader walking in on Monday. District planning documents this spring proposed drawing the new Wimauma middle school's attendance zone from Barrington, Eisenhower, Shields and Turkey Creek, four middle schools already carrying south county growth. Those reassignments do not take effect until the building opens.

Until then, the district manages the gap the way it always has: portable classrooms, boundary tweaks, and buses that run longer routes than parents would like. The district has not published a school-by-school capacity breakdown for the first day of this year.

Residents asked for a pause

Wimauma's crowded classrooms have been a fixture at the county government center for years. Residents went before Hillsborough County commissioners asking for a moratorium on new development and a comprehensive infrastructure study first, pointing to overcrowded schools alongside flooding, water problems and traffic on roads that were built for farms.

The county has been down that road before. An earlier south county moratorium on rezoning applications ran into 2022, and once it lifted, big residential approvals resumed, including a project of more than 1,800 homes on roughly 900 acres in Wimauma. Homes get built in about 18 months. A high school takes years, and the land has to be bought before the price runs away.

Hillsborough is the seventh-largest school district in the country, and the growth pressure is not evenly spread. While the south end needs 16 new buildings, the district spent the spring working through closures and consolidations at underenrolled campuses elsewhere in the county, including Graham Elementary, Madison Middle and Pizzo K-8 on the University of South Florida campus. Two problems, opposite directions, same budget.

The next date on the calendar

The Wimauma middle school still does not have a name. The district opened community nominations under the working label "Middle School VV" and took submissions through the end of July, with proposals judged against School Board Policy 7250, which covers who and what a campus can be named for. The School Board is scheduled to vote on a name at its Sept. 1 meeting. Families can follow construction and naming updates through Hillsborough County Public Schools.

For more coverage of school growth, boundary changes and county decisions in Wimauma and across the south county, visit Tampa Community Website and follow us on Facebook. Got a kid affected by a boundary change, or a classroom count you think we should know about? Join the conversation in our Community Forum.

You can read more education stories and more government and politics coverage from around Hillsborough County.

Header photo: Paul R. Burley / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)