Anyone who has watched the intersection at Anthem Parkway and Pope John Paul II Boulevard get fenced off and rebuilt over the past year has probably muttered something about the construction taking forever. The all-way stop that used to handle the corner without much fuss has spent more than twelve months getting torn up and re-poured while a roundabout takes its place. It has been easy to read that as routine road work, the kind of infrastructure churn every growing town goes through.
It is not routine. The timing is deliberate, and it lines up with something else happening at that same intersection this week: on August 11, Ave Maria Elementary opens its doors for the first time.
The road and the school are the same story
Ave Maria's first on-site public school sits at 4050 Anthem Parkway North, and the corner that has spent the past year under construction is the one that feeds directly into it. That is not a coincidence the district is shy about. Allyson Holland, District Manager of the Ave Maria Stewardship Community District, has been explicit that the loop road project exists in part because of the school and the residential growth clustered around it. Roadways, she has said, play a critical role in the town's projected growth, specifically the opening of the new elementary school and the substantial residential development going up alongside this stretch of Anthem Parkway.
Construction on the conversion began in July 2025. A project update from that December described the extension, including final paving and landscaping, as on track to be substantially complete by early spring. Whatever the exact status of the cones on any given day this month, the point stands: Ave Maria has spent over a year rebuilding a three-way stop specifically so it can absorb the twice-daily surge of a school that did not exist a year ago.
That surge is bigger than it sounds. Ave Maria Elementary is Collier County Public Schools' 33rd elementary school and is expected to serve roughly 400 students in its first year, with room designed for up to 900 as the town keeps filling in. A few quick facts worth knowing if you have not been following closely:
- The school welcomes students on August 11 and is already fully staffed, after the district drew applications from across the country and ran hundreds of interviews to build the team.
- Principal Bev Budzynski and Assistant Principal Matt Sibert led the ribbon-cutting on July 30, alongside Superintendent Dr. Leslie Ricciardelli and Barron Collier Companies CEO Blake Gable.
- The campus includes two dedicated golf cart drop-off and pick-up lanes, a detail the district built in specifically because so many Ave Maria families actually get around town that way.
That last point is the one that makes the road project click into place. A roundabout designed around car traffic alone would not need golf cart infrastructure. This one does, because the town planning around Ave Maria Elementary was planning around how Ave Maria actually moves, not how a generic Florida suburb might. Budzynski put it simply at the ribbon-cutting: "It's their school. It's the kids and community's school." The corner outside it had to be rebuilt to match.
The school is not arriving alone, either. The Freedom Institute, a private high school, is opening a 10,000-square-foot campus of its own this fall at 5078 Pope John Paul II Boulevard, a few blocks from the same corridor. Two new campuses converging on one stretch of road in the same season is not something that happens by accident in a town this size. It is what a fast-growing place looks like when its infrastructure has to catch up in real time rather than get built years ahead of demand.
The Town Center is absorbing the same growth, just with menus instead of intersections
The commercial side of Ave Maria has been going through its own version of the same thing. A town that could support a handful of restaurants a few years ago now supports a genuine rotation, and the additions since late last year read like a town that finally crossed a threshold rather than one still waiting to.
Umami Ave opened in Midtown Plaza in February, bringing Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, and Japanese dishes under one roof. Chef Jason Cao described the idea behind the name plainly: "Every culture has a different flavor profile and Asian cuisine is all about umami." His brother, Danny Dang, already ran Ave Nails in town, which is opening a second location at Midtown Plaza, a small detail that says something about how many Ave Maria business owners are also Ave Maria neighbors.
Ledo Pizza landed around the same stretch, serving the Maryland-style thin crust the chain is known for. Owner Scott Taggart is direct about the process: "We make fresh dough every two hours." Both additions joined a Town Center that already had OASIS The Kitchen Lounge for cocktails and small plates, Blue Agave for family-owned Mexican fare and its own labeled mezcal, Vicky Bakery for Cuban pastries, and The Rusty Putter, where Wednesday nights mean a full prime rib dinner.
None of this is background noise. It is the retail equivalent of the roundabout. A restaurant scene this varied does not show up in a town of a few thousand rooftops. It shows up once a town has enough year-round residents, enough foot traffic, and enough golf-cart trips down Annunciation Circle to make a second nail salon location and a from-scratch pizza kitchen both pencil out in the same plaza. The school forced a road rebuild. The population forced a menu rebuild. Same underlying number, two different departments handling it.
What that means for the rest of the season
If the corner at Anthem and Pope John Paul II is any indication, the next few months are going to keep layering changes on top of each other rather than settling into something predictable. The Farmers Market has run every Saturday from November 1 through late April for the past several seasons, growing from around 25 vendors in its early years to more than 50 by this past spring, with live music starting most mornings around 11. If that pattern holds, expect it back in the Town Center again once the weather turns.
The same goes for the annual run of Town Center events that residents have come to expect each winter: Taste of Ave, the Blues, Brews and BBQ Festival with live sets from regional acts, the Shamrock Festival, the Margarita and Taco Festival, and the Sunshine State Steak Cook-Off, where teams grill for a crowd and dinners get served buffet-style by early evening. None of these are new to Ave Maria, but each one now plays out in a town center with more restaurants flanking it and more families walking or golf-carting in from a neighborhood that did not have its own elementary school a month ago.
One smaller thing changed too, and it is worth mentioning because it says something about the kind of town this still is even as it grows. A residential street in Gatherpoint, formerly called Aguila Street, was renamed Smith Street this year in honor of Tammy Smith, a woman remembered by neighbors and colleagues at Ave Maria Utility Company. It is a quiet gesture, the kind of thing that happens in a town where people still know each other's names even as the roundabouts get bigger and the parking lots fill in.
That is really the throughline here. The detour on Anthem Parkway was never just about smoothing out a stop sign. It was Ave Maria building the road it would need before the school that required it had even opened. The same growth shows up in the Town Center's new tenant mix and in the fact that a road named after a longtime local still gets that kind of care. Watch that corner over the next few months. It is a decent preview of where the rest of town is headed next.
If you are curious how any of this, the school, the road work, the Town Center's growing footprint, might be shaping values or timing for a move within Ave Maria, Jennifer Rosenwald knows the corridor well and is always glad to talk through what it means for your specific street or community. Let's Connect.
