As preliminary analysis is completed and Tigard-Tualatin School District checks off early boxes on its Fowler Middle School rebuild project, the district is changing its plans.
The project, backed by the $421.3 million capital investment bond passed by voters in May of 2025, aimed to construct a new middle school on the east side of the current Fowler campus. It was determined that Fowler Middle School, which was constructed in 1974, needed extensive renovation prior to the bond being passed.
The new facility was originally planned to have three stories, more modern amenities and be anchored around the school’s main gymnasium, with a total project budget of $150 million.
While most elements of the 2025 design are still present, Tigard-Tualatin School District recently moved to modify its renovations, cutting out the proposed third story, switching to a wood-framed structure, demolishing the current gym and keeping the Susan McCormick Baseball Field.
“The original design for the Fowler rebuild centered around preserving the large main gym as an anchor point for the new campus,” reads a statement from TTSD. “Following completion of soil testing, however, it was determined that preserving the gym is no longer practical due to the extensive process required to amend the soil.”
“The soil was definitely one factor in the redesign,” TTSD Director of Communications Jordan Mills told Tigard Life. “It happened this last spring, so early in the summer was when we realized that the amendments that we needed to make to the soil would be simply too laborious.”
Mills explained that soil testing revealed that construction could be more expensive and involve more concrete than originally anticipated. Therefore, the district rearranged the rebuild to move away from the old gymnasium, originally constructed in 1974, and feature a “slightly smaller footprint.”
“Lastly, we moved to a two-story design from a three-story design because it improves visibility, supervision, and mobility throughout the building,” Mills said. “When we decided to no longer anchor the design to the existing gym, we gained the flexibility to spread the building out on the campus, allowing us to use a two-story design.”
While plans are still flexible, according to the district, the Susan McCormick Baseball Field, which sits slightly west of the school building, will now be incorporated into the new campus’s master plan.
“The baseball field is phenomenal, it is huge!” Mills said. “Because it is so big, it is hard to replicate elsewhere. Also, there are some restrictions on the site, just based on what the floodplain areas are and things like that, so there are places where things are built like the baseball field that could not be recreated these days in that exact same area.”
The new school was originally planned at around 153,000 square feet, and TTSD did not specify how much the new design approach would affect the proposed campus’s square footage.
While shrinking in terms of height, TTSD now plans on purchasing two pieces of property along Walnut Street that will potentially help provide space for the school’s new track. The properties cost approximately $1.4 million and will be purchased with the district’s land acquisition fund and not with money from the bond.
“If you look at an overhead view of those two properties, it almost looks like there’s been a bite taken out of the campus,” Mills said. “By purchasing that property, we are able to expand the site and actually make it more of a rectangular campus.”
Mills said that the new site plan will benefit from the increased flexibility attained without the restoration of the original gymnasium.
“Without keeping the original gym as an anchor point, it gives a lot more flexibility for designing the building itself,” Mills said.
New additions to the rebuild plan were expected to set the project back, and TTSD said they now expect construction to commence in fall of 2027. The new school is still slated to open its doors in time for the 2029-2030 school year.
