New Arlington ISD junior high celebrates namesake as construction reaches milestone
As hammers thwacked iron and sparks showered from the scaffolding of Arlington ISD's newest junior high, Sharpies scribbled against a steel beam.
Holding the Sharpies were the Rodriguez family. One wrote to her husband. Two wrote to their son. Three wrote to their father.
All wrote to Joey Rodriguez. He was a soccer coach who Arlington ISD is now memorializing with a new junior high school named after him.
With the signed beam placed, Joey Rodriguez Junior High reached a milestone moment in construction and moved closer to its fall 2025 opening. The east Arlington campus, part of a nearly $1 billion bond voters approved in 2019, will replace the 66-year-old Carter Junior High .
Once open, Joey Rodriguez Junior High's 155,000 square feet will serve about 1,500 students and include 48 classroom spaces.
School board members voted to name the campus after Joey in April. Before then, Lena Rodriguez, Joey's wife, didn't know the school would bear her late husband's namesake.
Five months later, as Lena toured the construction site at the topping-out ceremony, she said it all felt surreal.
"I hate using that word, it feels cliche, but that's exactly what it is. I know this is actually what's happening," Lena said. "To have something this stellar, this beautiful, and all of the passion behind it — not coming just from our family, it's coming from the community and the school district — it's very humbling."
Joey coached at Sam Houston High School for 12 years, consistently taking his team to playoffs. In 2021, he died from COVID-19 at 44.
The school's location, and the students it will serve, remind Joey's mother, Susie Rodriguez, of her son's character as a coach.
Rodriguez Junior High will serve students from a wide range of backgrounds, just as Joey did throughout his life.
It's a shiny, new top-of-the-line campus serving a historically economically disadvantaged part of Arlington. The school will inherit the students of Carter Junior High, where 93.6% of children qualified for free or reduced-priced lunch in the 2023-24 academic year, according to the Texas Education Agency.
On Joey's soccer teams, he'd often coach students from struggling families and who had behavioral issues. Susie remembers her son having nothing but love for them, she said.
"He'd wash their uniforms, he went and bought them food, he did so much for these kids, and then helped them go to college," Susie said.
She was happy as she toured the construction site, Susie said, but one thought kept coming back to her: Joey should be seeing this.
With the building's steel structure complete, the most challenging, three-month phase of construction is over, said Beverly Fornof, project manager and vice president of Corgan Architects.
Construction crews will now spend October and November building walls and windows. Officials hope to have the school weatherproofed and ready for interior work by December, Fornof said.
The building has required a daily average of 130 construction workers, but moving forward, it will see up to 250 workers a day, Ty Parsons, executive vice president for Lee Lewis Construction, said during the ceremony.
Joey Rodriguez Junior High will be Arlington ISD's first three-story campus — a feature demanded by the project's limited lot space. In planning the building, architects had to work around a surrounding floodplain.
The three stories are intentionally "stepped" to account for the surrounding residential housing, Fornof said, so the building's highest point overlooks the floodplain instead of residents.
The school is located at the former site of Knox Elementary School, which was demolished. Arlington ISD will now manage the neighboring Helen Wessler Park , which sits across a creek from the campus. The district will connect the two properties with a pedestrian bridge.
The topping-out ceremony was a first with Arlington ISD for Superintendent Matt Smith, who entered his role in January. He told the Report he felt lucky to have joined in the middle of the project, and he's excited for the school's future students.
Lena described her husband's ambitions as lofty. He'd always dreamed of coaching at the college or professional level, she said. But whenever any opportunities came up, he decided to stay with his students at Sam Houston.
"He could not, for whatever it was, leave Arlington, leave Sam Houston, leave that program," she said. "His heart, his passion, was here, so he made the right call. This building's going to keep his memory alive even longer."
Drew Shaw is a reporting fellow for the Arlington Report. Contact him at or .
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