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The Los Fresnos Consolidated Independent School welcomed the Resaca Middle School community on Thursday in a ribbon cutting ceremony for the new campus that sits just off FM 511 at Rancho Alto Drive.
The 700 students who attend Resaca Middle School are being moved from the school’s old location in central Los Fresnos, which in turn will become Los Cuates Middle School.
That will allow the original Los Cuates campus, Los Fresnos’ onetime high school built in 1954, to be refurbished into a Career and Technical Education center, where a new agriculture barn is under construction. The CTE complex is to open in 2024.
Resaca Middle School is the centerpiece of a $63 million expansion plan approved by voters in May 2021.
District officials including Superintendent Gonzalo Salazar, Principal Apolonia Renteria and Rolando Borrayo, director of Facilities and Maintenance, welcomed the students and their parents to the new school amid a special presentation by Los Fresnos High School’s Mariachi Nuevo Halcon.
Elisa Tovar attended the ceremony with her children, Aliana in seventh grade at Resaca and Arian at Rancho Verde Elementary next door.
“The environment is going to be the same. Our teachers are fabulous; the administrators are fabulous. The difference is we’re going to have a new building, and we’re going to make it home. The first-generation sixth-graders are going to be coming here for the first time and the seventh and eighth graders are coming over from the old Resaca Middle School,” she said.
Tovar said the ceremony left her with “a sense of pride knowing that Los Fresnos is highly dedicated to our children.”
Nearby, eighth-graders Cadis Abrego and Melissa Vargas said they were excited for the new opportunity of a new building.
“It’s like a new chapter,” Melissa said. She attended Rancho Verde Elementary, and her friend, Olmito Elementary.
Abrego said she thinks the first day of school will be chaotic, with everyone really excited and rowdy but then getting down to business.
Athletic Director David Cantu, a Los Fresnos native who attended Los Cuates, said the new facilities place Los Fresnos on the leading edge of what is available in today’s educational landscape.
“The good thing about that is it allows us to look at our other facilities to improve and upgrade. For example, at Los Cuates they ripped up rubber gym floor and put in new hardwood floor. That wouldn’t have happened if this didn’t happen. It makes a better environment for our kids,” Cantu said, thanking Adan Lopez, who stood nearby and served on the LFCISD Board of Trustees for 17 years as Resaca Middle School and other elements of a growing school district were envisioned.
“Our district is a very inviting district. Right now there’s choices, there’s charter schools. Stuff like this allows us to compete with the IDEAs of the world. If a kid lives in our Los Fresnos zone we want them to be at Los Fresnos regardless of athletics. …Now athletics wise, they’ve got the beautiful gymnasium and practice gym. The beautiful thing is all the schools are set up that way,” Cantu said.
“My little girl is in fifth grade. She’ll be at Los Cuates; she’ll stay over there. But I know this is going to be an attractive place for a lot of people,” he said.
Aug. 14 is the first day of classes in Los Fresnos and many other Rio Grande Valley school districts.
Margarita Villalares, who lives in the Los Pinos subdivision near Olmito Elementary on Brownsville’s outskirts, said Resaca’s opening will make her life a little easier.
Her children and others from Olmito Elementary previously were bussed to the old Resaca in central Los Fresnos. Now they will attend neighborhood schools from elementary to middle school.
