The San Marcos Rattlers football team will play its first home game next year at an 8,000-seat football stadium if progress continues at its current rate.

Construction of the stadium and activity center approved as part of a bond election in May is on schedule, according to a presentation given by Daren Kirbo, vice president of Huckabee, the architecture firm handling the bond projects.

"We got really good activity on the stadium and the activity center," Kirbo said. "We should be breaking ground next week. That's a celebration in itself."

The football stadium and activity center have been budgeted for $18.4 million and $13.6 million, respectively. Jason Gossett, assistant superintendent of finance and support services, said some of that total includes permitting and other technical aspects of the project. Actual construction is expected to total just less than $30 million.

Kirbo said the stadium would start going up in the spring and be completed by August.

"Delivering $29.7 million of construction in about 10 months is pretty phenomenal," Kirbo said. "That's K-12 construction, and that's stadium construction."

News on the construction of a prekindergarten campus and the Phoenix Learning Center was not as positive, Kirbo said. When the district budgeted the projects, it planned on paying up to $175 per square foot. The bids for the prekindergarten campus and PLC came in at a "staggering" $225 per square foot, Kirbo said.

"This is not gold-plated design," Kirbo said. "This is basic design."

The prekindergarten facility was originally expected to be completed in August 2014, but Kirbo said opening the projects to bid again would delay the project's completion. Kirbo said the new timeline would take 12 months and would be complete in December 2014.

The district will put the project out to bid again in November. Kirbo said the new timeline should bring in lower bids.

"I will tell you we have stuck with the bond square footage real close, and we have delivered what was in the bond—nothing more—and this is where we are now," he said.