Centennial High School Replacement Project — Compton USD

The groundbreaking pulled a celebrity crowd that public-school construction normally doesn’t get.

Compton Unified School District broke ground on its $270 million Centennial High School replacement project on May 11, 2026, with more than 300 community members and nearly 900 students on the football field. Three alums of the school — Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar, and will.i.am — attended the ceremony alongside district leadership and the project team. The replacement campus will sit on the existing site at 2606 North Central Avenue and is scheduled to open for the 2028 academic year.

Project Scope

The replacement project demolishes most of the 1950s-era Centennial campus and rebuilds it as a modern three-story academic complex. The new campus will house approximately 1,800 students across roughly 240,000 square feet of classroom, lab, administrative, and gymnasium space. Program highlights include a STEM wing with engineering, robotics, and computer science labs, an arts and media center, an expanded athletic complex, and a community room sized for after-hours public use.

The project is funded through Compton USD’s Measure S bond program, the $350 million district-wide capital initiative voters approved in 2020 to rebuild aging campuses across Compton. Centennial is the largest single project in the bond program. Construction will be staged so that students remain on the existing campus during the build, with the new buildings rising adjacent to active classrooms before the older structures come down.

The design team and the construction manager have not been publicly named in district announcements at groundbreak. Compton USD typically delivers projects under California’s Lease-Leaseback or CM-at-Risk delivery models for major school construction; the bond program documents reference both pathways depending on project size and scope.

The campus is targeting California’s Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) verification, the state’s K-12 equivalent of LEED, with credits emphasizing daylighting, indoor air quality, water conservation, and on-site renewable generation. A rooftop solar array sized for offsetting a meaningful share of campus energy demand is included in the program documents.

Why It Matters

The Centennial rebuild is the largest K-12 construction project Compton has undertaken in more than 60 years. The existing campus, last meaningfully renovated in the early 1990s, has been the source of long-running facilities complaints — HVAC failures, outdated science labs, and a layout that doesn’t match how the district’s career and technical education programs run today.

For the broader Los Angeles County K-12 construction pipeline, the project is part of a wave. Compton joins LAUSD, Long Beach Unified, and Inglewood Unified in delivering multi-hundred-million-dollar campus rebuilds in the 2026–2030 window, funded mostly through local bond measures passed in 2020 and 2022. Combined, the L.A. County K-12 capital pipeline through 2030 exceeds $8 billion, with most of the spending concentrated in districts that serve majority-Latino and majority-Black student populations.

The celebrity attendance is more than ceremony. Dr. Dre committed $10 million in 2017 to fund a performing arts complex at Compton High School (a separate campus), and his foundation has continued to back facilities investment in the district. The optics of Centennial alumni returning for the groundbreak — Dre graduated in 1983, will.i.am in 1993, Lamar in 2005 — gives the bond program a visibility that pure technical merit doesn’t deliver.

First students enter the new Centennial campus in August 2028.

Project Team & Details