The final beam to the new Pine Bluff High School campus was placed Friday, and some of its future students were there to see a piece of history.
Hearing about some of the amenities of the Zebras’ new home, senior executive cabinet President Adam Price grew “a little bit salty and a little bit jealous,” he said while emceeing the topping-out ceremony.
He was half-joking for very good reason – he and his fellow senior classmates won’t get to walk the halls when the school opens. But he “most definitely” felt the class of 2026 set the foundation, proverbially, for things to come on West 11th Avenue.
“I’ll never really forget where we actually came from,” Price said. “Even if we won’t be a part of it, I’m good knowing I was part of the journey. Even though I wasn’t there for the finish, I was really there along the way.”
Students, along with district leaders and other community members, also etched their names in history, so to speak, signing the final beam that connects the 900-seat auditorium to the 2,200-seat basketball arena at the 173,500-square foot campus, substantially smaller than the 250,000-square foot PBHS that was demolished in June 2024.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Tenth- through 12th-graders in the Pine Bluff School District currently attend the temporary PBHS at the former Jack Robey Junior High School on South Olive Street. Ninth grade, which had been taught at PBHS through the spring of 2023, is now housed in its own academy at Pine Bluff Junior High on Fluker Avenue.
Sophomore class President Jovan Hamlet is looking forward to the new events on campus like poetry slams.
“I love being a part of events at Pine Bluff itself,” said Hamlet, who is interested in art and cosmetology. “At the new building, it’ll be so much better.”
The new PBHS will also bring the same teachers in a better environment, Hamlet added.
“It will spark more in me,” he said.
The opportunities the new campus will bring excites third-year district Superintendent Jennifer Barbaree.
“We’re not finished yet, but we are absolutely on target, regarding our timeframe,” she said. “We did have a couple months of wet, but then we were blessed by a really hot dry (spell), so those really hot dry months kept on working. It’s fantastic.”
Barbaree said the new PBHS will be substantially completed by June 2026, with move-in ready for the following month. It will be the second new high school completed in the city, following Watson Chapel High School, expected to be finished in the spring.
“The roof is almost completely on. We’re getting into the dry (season), and we’re on schedule for a summer 2026 turnover,” said Van Tilbury, president and CEO of East Harding Construction, adding the project has not endured any delays.
“There was a lot of planning that went into the project, with the architects and engineers, and we’re on schedule,” Tilbury said. “What we’ll do, we’ll start to turn over buildings in phases starting the first quarter of ’26, and then the district can move in their furniture, fixtures, equipment and get their rooms set up so that they’re ready when we turn over the project in the summer.”
Lewis Architects Engineers is the architecture firm.
The price tag for the new PBHS is an estimated $74 million. The district received $12 million in match funding from the state of Arkansas in 2021, and district voters approved a unified, increased millage rate to 47.7 toward construction in 2023. The millage increase was expected to yield about $65 million.
Ground was broken for the new campus and the old campus was demolished in June 2024.
“I’m just tremendously proud of our community,” said district board President Sederick Charles Rice, who graduated from PBHS in 1990. “I’m tremendously proud of our stakeholders, our supporters, our board, everybody that supported this project. It’s not about us. It’s about our students and future scholars, and I really appreciate them.”
