Magnolia Oaks Academy Opens Aug. 10 in SilverLeaf With 1,300 Students and a K-7 Roster

Magnolia Oaks Academy, the first public school built inside the SilverLeaf community west of St. Augustine, opens to roughly 1,300 students on Monday, Aug. 10, and it will run as a kindergarten-through-seventh-grade campus in its first year. The St. Johns County School District showed the building to community leaders and press on Wednesday, July 22, two and a half weeks before the first bell at 8 a.m.

The address is 800 Courtney Vista Drive. The building covers about 190,000 square feet on 28 acres, with 73 classrooms and room for close to 1,500 students, which means the school opens with a few hundred seats still in reserve. For SilverLeaf families who have been driving past construction fencing for two years, it is the neighborhood school they were promised.

Bell times, and how they differ from Nocatee's new school

Magnolia Oaks runs on the same schedule as the district's other K-8 academies in the northwest part of the county. Sabal Crest Academy, the second new K-8 opening the same day near Nocatee, starts 40 minutes later. Both dismiss early on Wednesdays, as every school in the district does.

School	Start / Dismissal	Wed.
Magnolia Oaks Academy	8:00 a.m. / 2:20 p.m.	1:20 p.m.
Sabal Crest Academy	8:40 a.m. / 3:00 p.m.	2:00 p.m.

Kindergarten families have a separate schedule to watch. The school has posted staggered-start information for its youngest students, along with arrival and dismissal procedures, Meet the Teacher details and the 2026-2027 parent and student handbook, on its school website. Anyone planning to walk past the front office on a school day, including for classroom help, needs district school access, which runs through the volunteer application and is good for three years.

What's inside

The campus includes a media center, a full indoor gymnasium, a cafeteria, playgrounds and open collaborative learning areas. Course offerings run to elementary STEM, television production and yearbook, plus arts programming, athletics and clubs. The school will also offer extended-day services and advanced coursework.

Donny Hoessler is the founding principal. Danielle Coates and Jill Loughran are the assistant principals. Hoessler said at the tour that enthusiasm in SilverLeaf has been off the charts and that families are eager to build the school's first traditions from scratch, according to local news reports.

Those traditions started with a naming process. Residents turned in close to 500 school name ideas and more than 1,000 mascot suggestions across a series of community meetings. The result: Magnolia Oaks Academy, home of the Tigers.

The portable math behind two new schools

Magnolia Oaks and Sabal Crest bring the district to 54 schools serving more than 52,600 students. Both were built for the same reason: St. Johns County keeps adding rooftops faster than it adds permanent classrooms.

The scale of that gap shows up in the district's own facilities numbers, which count 457 relocatable units totaling more than 388,000 square feet. Local reports have put the number of students learning in portables countywide at more than 13,000. Two new K-8 campuses will not erase that, but they pull pressure off nearby schools that had been absorbing SilverLeaf's growth.

Superintendent Brennan Asplen used the tour to point to the district's academic record along with the new building, noting its standing as Florida's top-ranked district. County Commissioner Ann Taylor, four school board members and a St. Johns County Sheriff's Office patrol commander were among those who walked the halls before students arrive.

Voters funded a share of this building program themselves. In November 2024, county residents extended the half-cent sales tax for school capital projects and approved an additional one-mill property tax for four years aimed at teacher and staff pay. Two more school openings are the visible result; the district has not said which campus comes next after this pair.

Eighth grade is not on the schedule at Magnolia Oaks this year. Families with rising eighth graders should confirm their assignment through the district before Aug. 10, and check the school site for bus and car-line routing, which is the detail most likely to snarl a brand-new campus on day one.

For more coverage of local schools and county growth, visit St. Johns Community Website and browse our education stories and community news. Follow along on Facebook, and if your child is starting at Magnolia Oaks or Sabal Crest, join the conversation in our Community Forum and tell us how the first week goes.