The former home of the College Station Police Department will be used to temporarily accommodate the growth experienced by International Leadership of Texas, a public charter school that serves kindergarten through ninth-grade students.
Through a three-year, $1 million lease agreement approved Thursday by the College Station City Council, ILTexas will use the recently vacated police headquarters to house its first class of tenth-grade students in the fall, adding 11th and 12th grades in subsequent years. School officials will have the option of exercising two one-year extensions, if needed.
The agreement allows ILTexas to lease the 29,000-square-foot building — constructed at Texas Avenue and William King Cole Drive in 1978 and expanded about a decade later — until expansion to its Longmire Drive campus is completed, which is estimated to be by fall 2023.
“This is a tremendous arrangement for both parties,” Natalie Ruiz, the city's director of economic development, says. “The building will soon be repurposed in positive way, while also generating revenues that we can put to use for our citizens in a variety of ways.”
The city and ILTexas will collaborate on plans for readying the building's interior, implementing traffic control and parking strategies, and handling facility maintenance.
“ILTexas is thrilled about this partnership between the city of College Station and our school,” says Dr. Heather McMahan, principal of ILTexas College Station K-9. “This community is so near and dear to the many Aggies who work for ILTexas. Expanding into the Police Department Building will allow us to serve even more children in the College Station community and we can’t wait to have our first College Station graduating class in 2023!”
