Construction begins on two south Sacramento schools. Upgrades to be completed fall 2025

Alex Muegge
·2 min read

The sun beat down on roughly 900 students and faculty Monday morning as the Sacramento City Unified School District broke ground on its first new school in almost 20 years.

Edward Kemble Elementary and Cesar Chavez Intermediate, located at the corner of 29th Street and Torrance Avenue in the Meadowview neighborhood, are slated to be finished in the fall of 2025, according to a district news release. The new campus will feature an oversized multipurpose room, several shade canopies, a youth soccer field and a science, technology, engineering, art and math lab.

Genesis Mendez, a second grader at Edward Kemble, started kindergarten in 2020. She is a member of the school’s dual-language immersion program that teaches in English and Spanish. She said she plans on attending the school after fall 2025 when its upgrades are completed.

Current third-graders will be in sixth grade when the new school opens, according to Brian Heap, a spokesman for SCUSD.

Mendez, a speaker at Monday’s event, told of the virtual learning, masks and staggered recess times she endured as part of the school’s reopening process after COVID-19. She said it was important for her to be in the classroom learning and is excited to do that with such improvements.

“Sí, se puede,” she said. “Together, we can persevere if we wait for our new school.”

Lilia Cisneros, left, a bilingual immersion teacher at Cesar Chavez Intermediate School, joins Genesis Mendes, 7, a second-grader at Edward Kemble Elementary School, Councilwoman Mai Vang, Sacramento City Unified school board president Chinua Rhodes, and his daughter Rosa Maria, 7, a first grader at Edward Kemble, during the groundbreaking ceremony on Monday, June 5, 2023, for construction of a state-of-the-art campus to replace the aging facilities at Edward Kemble and Cesar Chavez schools.

SCUSD Superintendent Jorge Aguilar, Sacramento City Councilwoman Mai Vang, and Chinua Rhodes, president of the school board, were also in attendance.

Before the reconstruction project funded by Measure H, Edward Kemble was built 60 years ago and Cesar Chavez was added in 2001 after an immediate and sharp increase in enrollment, district officials said.

Measure H passed in March 2020 and gave the district $750 million to begin making some of the estimated $3.5 billion in facilities needs identified across the district, Heap said.

This is the first of three campus rebuilds this year: Nicholas Elementary in the Parkway neighborhood is scheduled to start construction on upgrades later this month; South Oak Park’s Oak Ridge Elementary will begin work in September.