VISTA -- With yellow and orange hard hats poking out from every cranny, a dozen tractors roaring from place to place, and the smell of wet asphalt wafting through the campus, San Marcos Unified's 11th elementary campus seems anything but ready for the start of school next week.

Joli Ann Leichtag Elementary School, which is expected to welcome roughly 750 students on Tuesday, looks like a construction site.

"It's like we have a whole city here," Principal Eric Forseth said earlier this week as he looked out his office windows at construction workers on the roof, landscapers laying sod and a steady stream of hard hat-clad workers lugging tools and boxes around campus.

Forseth said school would start on time, even with all the construction work under way late this week. He said construction is mostly limited to the outside, not inside the classrooms.

"When you are outside it might feel like there is a lot to do, but in the classrooms it's much calmer," Forseth said, noting that construction crews and staff will be on campus every day leading up to the first day of school Tuesday. "The teachers are getting their rooms together."

On Wednesday, teachers were in their classrooms unstacking chairs, unpacking books for library shelves, and hanging laminated math tables and equations on the walls.

"It's going to happen," said Kylie Lewis, a fourth-grade teacher. "It has to. The kids are going to show up on Tuesday."

Fourth-grade teacher Christine Miringoff said she's ready for school to start.

"I'm ready for the first day -- we will see about the second day," she said. "I just want the kids to be here, to get started because then maybe all the nervousness will go away."

Joli Ann Leichtag Elementary is the district's newest elementary school.

Located on the western edge of the district in Vista, the school is expected to relieve overcrowding at the nearby Alvin Dunn, Paloma and Carrillo elementary schools, which district officials said are filled to capacity.

When Leichtag opens Tuesday -- along with the district's 16 other campuses, which combined will see roughly 17,800 students -- it will also be full, Forseth said. The roughly 750 students that administrators are expecting at Joli Ann is an increase from earlier projections that had pegged enrollment at 710 students.

There is only one vacant classroom on the 22-acre campus, a portable building, and it hasn't arrived yet, he said.

Overall, the district will have about 1,000 students more at the start of this school year than it did last year, officials said.

Joli Ann, which was named in recognition of a $6 million endowment the district received a year ago from the Leichtag Family Foundation, features the latest advancements in technology, including digital overhead and video projectors and built-in computer labs in every classroom.

There also are sky lights throughout the buildings, new playground equipment, a library with panoramic views of the school and an expansive athletic field that won't be used for the first few months so the new grass can take root.

Contact staff writer Shayna Chabner at (760) 740-5416 or schabner@nctimes.com.