HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — It’s an update to a story we first told you about in early June. 

Parents at Robinson High School and Hillsborough County Public Schools are still trying to find a solution to the illegal dumping and speeding around the campus. 

However, new updates and community input could be helping to solve the problem.

Lately, there has been a lot of movement around the school and across Rembrandt Drive, the small street owned by the district.

“So we’ve actually started to move dirt around and level the field so that we can have a place to put all the portables. So there will be classrooms that students will temporarily move to while we’re knocking down those buildings during demolition, then rebuilding those buildings back up,” said Hillsborough County Public Schools Chief of Operations Chris Farkas.

It’s not a grassy overgrown field anymore, but to get to those portable classrooms, students will have to cross Rembrandt Drive every day.

Illegal dumping and speeding have been problems for a long time, and volunteers are still cleaning up the mess regularly.

“Ideally we’d love to have it vacated, but understanding it’s community use. Vacated at least during the day or vacating it totally would be our optimal choice. It’s in the city’s hands right now as we go through that process,” said Farkas.

The district has filed to close the road and there are plans for more community meetings.

“If it is vacated during school hours, it affords us the opportunity to make sure we keep that clean,” he said.

In the meantime, improvements at the high school will continue as students learn in the portables.

Three of the original buildings will be knocked down and new, modern ones will be built in their place.

The goal is to help accommodate the large number of students coming to Robinson.

“There has been a waiting list there, an IB program that’s been hugely successful, our MacDill population is loving going to Robinson as well. So those two combinations are ones where they’ve been bursting at the seams,” said Farkas.

Demolition is scheduled to start in two months and finish August 2023.

Students can also expect updates to the cafeteria and football complex.

“When the kids move back in, it’ll be like moving back into a brand new building,” he said.