Compton High School, Compton, California

Compton High School is a replacement campus that had to be built around a utility that wasn’t going anywhere. Swinerton and DLR Group delivered the 31-acre campus for Compton Unified School District mostly inside the footprint of a 126-year-old school, and ENR named it the Best Project in K-12 Education in its 2026 West Best Projects awards on Oct. 26, 2026.

The district opened the campus with a ribbon cutting in May 2025. It serves about 1,800 students and was paid for by Measure S, the bond Compton voters approved in 2015.

Project Scope

The new school centers on a 140,639-square-foot academic building, a 36,534-square-foot gym and the 40,868-square-foot Andre “Dr. Dre” Young Performing Arts Center. Young, a Compton native, gave $10 million toward it. The library is digital-first, with no physical books. Outside there’s a football stadium, fields for baseball, softball and soccer, tennis and basketball courts and a half-size Olympic pool.

DLR Group was lead designer and also handled structural and mechanical engineering. VCA Engineers did civil work, and MIG | AHBE did the landscape architecture. Cumming Group managed the program for the district. Taft Electric, ACCO Engineered Systems and Junior Steel Co. were among the trade partners named in the award entry.

Swinerton puts the cost at $232 million. ENR’s entry lists $205 million. The city vacated a residential street so the campus could grow across it.

Why It Matters

The hard part wasn’t the buildings. Southern California Edison’s poles and lines stood right where foundations were supposed to go, and they stayed energized while the utility designed its own relocation. The team sequenced early work away from the live lines, enforced BIM zones of influence as physical exclusion zones and kept running high-voltage briefings until the poles came down. Long-lead switchgear was another risk. Early kickoff meetings with every authority having jurisdiction clawed back about four weeks on the gear.

There’s a local-hiring story here too. Under the district’s “Built by Compton” program, more than 60% of the workforce was local, against Swinerton’s 35% goal, with nearly 200 workers on site at peak and roughly 720,000 work hours logged.

That’s the part other bond-funded districts will study. Rebuilding on the same constrained site, with the old school demolished first and a utility in the way, isn’t the cheap or easy route. Compton shows it can still finish with a campus the town actually wanted.

Project Team & Details