Members of the Carter County Board of Education gave the green light to a $1.5 Million construction project to relieve overcrowding at Central Elementary School.
During the Board’s meeting Thursday afternoon, members voted unanimously to approve the lowest qualifying bid to complete a six classroom expansion at the school. The renovation will eliminate the use of two modular units at the school and move the school’s two state mandated computer labs out of classrooms and into their own space.
“We have two labs that aren’t really labs, they are teacher classrooms,” said Central Elementary Principal Terry Morley said. “If you have to have testing, you have to kick the teacher out and you can’t have class.”
The project will also provide proper classrooms for two special needs classes that are currently house in two rooms that were once teacher workrooms. Carter County Director of Schools Dr. Kevin Ward said the former workrooms do not have enough square-footage of space to meet state requirements for a classroom.
Morley told board members the number of special education students at his school is higher than average.
“Seventeen percent is about the average special education population for a school, but our population is about 29 percent,” he said.
Board member Craig Davis asked Morley and Ward if the project would provide space for future growth at the school.
“How far down the line will this solve the problems at Central,” Davis asked. “How long before you’ll have to expand again?”
Morley said the school system had studied census data regarding projected population growth and compared it with actual growth rate and enrollment numbers at the school.
“This is not a band-aid solution for us,” Morley said. “This is fixes us in a permanent way.”
“I’ll be retired before crowding becomes a problem again and I’ve got several years to go,” he added. “I’ll be here another 12 or 13 years.”
Board member LaDonna Stout Boone voiced her support for the expansion, citing both the needs of the school system and a promise made to the community.
“I have not forgotten Range Elementary,” she said, adding the closure of the school was hard for that community. “That school closed and we promised them things would be better.”
With the closure of Range Elementary, many of those students moved to Central, which has now become overcrowded.
“This project show them the good that can come and shows them we have not forgotten them,” Boone said.
Ward told members of the Board the lowest eligible bid for the project came in at $1,505,000. Currently, the school system has $1,225,274 in state-provided funding available in a Basic Education Program (BEP) Capital Reserve Fund account, which Ward said could only be used for one-time capital improvement projects like the one planned at Central. The remaining $279,726 for the project would be taken from the school’s fund balance, he added.
Members of the Board voted unanimously voted to approve awarding the bid to Comsa Construction and also unanimously approved the funding for the project.
During the discussion of the Central project, board members also addressed crowding at other schools, particularly the three feeder elementary schools for Unaka High School, which are Keenburg, Hunter and Unaka Elementary schools.
One of the modular units currently in use at the school will be demolished while the other will be transported and set up at Keenburg Elementary to help ease crowding at that school. That will bring the number of modular classrooms at that school to 10, Keenburg Principal Jason Hartley told the Board.
The number of classrooms housed in modular units is pretty similar at Hunter and Unaka Elementary schools. Hunter Elementary Principal Mark Revis reported his school currently has 9 classrooms in modular units while Unaka Elementary Principal Jaclyn Wilson said her school has 8 classrooms currently in modular units.
Ward told board members that while the crowding situation at Central can be fixed by the school system without seeking additional funding from the county, any project to address crowding at Keenburg, Hunter and Unaka Elementary schools would be a much larger project and would require funding from the County Commission.
“It’s going to be a multi-million dollar project,” Ward said.
While many of the county schools are struggling with space issues, Ward said the needs are most critical at Keenburg, Hunter and Unaka Elementaries.
“We have a space problem, and part of that space problem is because of TNReady because TNReady took some of our classrooms to make computer labs for testing,” Ward said.
Ward told board members the school system is going to be looking at enrollment numbers and a large number of other issues and will be working to develop a few different plans on how to address the crowding issues at those three elementary schools and will ultimately present those plans to the County Commission.