Newly built $60 million Marshall Middle School to fill gap in Northeast Austin

On a warm Wednesday afternoon in late May, workers wired lighting and cleaned windows in the still-empty halls of General Marshall Middle School.

In about three months, students will walk the halls of the new campus at 4401 Tilley St. for the first time.

The shiny new campus is how officials are looking to fill a nearly decadelong gap in Austin’s northeastern community, which lacked a default middle school for students in the area.

“The district has built Marshall to be another option for families that live nearby,” said Jordan Benson, principal of the new school.

The $60 million campus was financed through a 2017 school district bond program and is slated to open in August. It'll only house sixth grade students.

The three-story school sits in the heart of the Mueller development around the former Robert Mueller Municipal Airport, which the architect team drew inspiration from for the new campus, said Shashank Singh, project manager with AECOM, an infrastructure consulting firm.

Walking through the school, Singh pointed to the building’s sleek, curved roof, noting it’s designed to look like the wing of an airplane. The courtyard in the middle of the school is meant to mimic an airplane hangar, he said.

The school will eventually hold as many as 800 students, but the district wants to add children grade by grade to help build up a new culture on the campus, Benson said.

Sixth grade, when students go from elementary to middle school, is already a scary year for children, she said.

“It’s uncomfortable when you make those transitions, and the first thing you need is to feel safe and a sense of belonging,” Benson said.

The district expects about 275 sixth graders to begin the school year at Marshall, she said. Only fifth graders who are zoned to Andrews, Blanton, Harris, Jordan, Norman-Sims, Overton, Pecan Springs and Winn schools can register to attend the new school for the fall.

Marshall is filling a role long absent in the area, said District 1 school board member Candace Hunter.

The district in 2014 converted two failing middle schools in the northeastern part of the district — Pearce and Gus Garcia middle schools — to single-gender schools: Bertha Sadler Means Young Women’s and Gus Garcia Young Men’s leadership academies.

The change, though fraught with controversy at the time, was an attempt to turn around the failing schools, Hunter said.

However, it also meant rising sixth graders in the area who didn’t want to go to single-gender school didn’t have a default option, besides Webb Middle School at 601 E. St. Johns Ave.

While children generally can transfer to other schools if the campus has a specific program or for other reasons, all Austin students have a default area school.

Instead, students transferred — a common practice in the Austin district — to schools outside their neighborhood.

“What I don’t want in District 1 is for parents to say my neighborhood school is not up to my expectations so I’m transferring out,” Hunter said.

That neighborhood alignment is important to building communities around a school and providing a direct line to the programs offered at area high schools — LBJ and Northeast early college high schools — she said.

Marshall will fill that area gap.

“This will be a really great opportunity to have an all-gender school and have these STEM-focused programs to support LBJ and support Northeast,” Hunter said. “We’re trying to build a feeder pattern for LBJ health sciences and Northeast sciences.”

The district plans to start accepting students in other grades to Marshall until that campus houses sixth through eighth graders.