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•🧑🎓 Who: Niceville High School, Principal Charlie Morello, Cheerleader Leah Tate, Superintendent Marcus Chambers, School Board Representative Brett Hinley
•🏗️ What: A new multipurpose building serving as a testing center, athletics space, and event venue
•📅 When: Opened in January 2025, funded by a tax approved in 2018, with revenue collection continuing until 2028
•📍 Where: Niceville High School, facing Old Coastal Highway, Okaloosa County, Florida
•💰 Why: Funded by the half-cent sales tax to provide improved school facilities for academics, arts, and athletics
Niceville High School doesn’t have a naming rights deal for their new multipurpose building that faces Old Coastal Highway.
That’s a good thing in the High School NIL Deals age – because Eagles Senior Cheerleader Leah Tate probably just came up with the moniker. Niceville High School Principal Charlie Morello “keeps calling this place the NHS Multipurpose Building,” Tate said, “Since we [the NHS Cheer Squad] moved into this building back in January, and since we won yet another state championship, I think it should be decided that this building should be referred to as the Niceville High School Center for Competitive Cheerleading. We will allow testing and other activies in here.” She got a roar of approval from the crowd.
The six-time champs may well get their name on the building. Who knows?
“The Niceville CCC,” Marello mused to the crowd when he returned the microphone, “I don’t hate it.”
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The building will have multiple purposes. It will allow a place for one-off events during the school day, like areas to take the PSAT and SAT that essentially canceled classes for the rest of the school because of the physical disruption forced on the school’s buildings to accommodate the test-taking. “We don’t lose instruction time because we got testing going on out here, and that’s huge,” Principal Morello explained.
In addition to a place to take standardized tests, the building hosts a basketball court. This weight room will alleviate the congestion in the school’s other physical training facility and a locker room for the baseball team.
The Okaloosa County School District built the structure at the school with half-cent sales tax dollars allocated to the task. According to Superintendent Marcus Chambers, they underestimated just how much the sales tax would bring in – by about $100 million. “it’s about academics and arts and athletics; it’s about the students, and we did not have facilities that match the excellence of the students that we have. And now we’re starting to have that,” Chambers said of the improvements brought by the voter-approved tax.
“Six years ago, the community as a whole got involved, and they saw these unfunded mandates [from the Florida State Legislature],” Said Niceville High Schools representative on the school board Brett Hinley. “They saw the infrastructure that was weak and needed help. So they said, as a community, ‘we’re going to tax ourselves. We’re going to tax ourselves for the consumption tax, a half-cent sales tax.’ Hinley continued, “Every dollar coming in gives us a half cent throughout the school district, and it’s huge.”
The Half Cent Sales Tax was approved by voters in 2018 and will sunset in 2028.
