Opponents of the planned site for a new high school reiterated concerns about the site’s viability and safety during Monday night’s meeting of the Colquitt County Board of Education.

Clarence Lowe, a former member of the board, said the architect’s plans were based on the site having a half-acre of wetlands, but Lowe said a map from the Natural Resources Conservation Service showed about two acres of wetlands there.

“Part of it is under where your cafeteria is going to be,” he told the board.

Lowe said the board has said after the high school is built at Packer Park off Darbyshire Road, the site will still have 99 buildable acres. The NRCS map, though, shows many of those acres in red, indicating land that is not suitable to build on. He said the map indicates only about 18 of those 99 acres are actually suitable for building.

“You could build on this soil that’s designated red if you throw enough money at it,” he said. “You can build on anything.”

He said he and his colleague, Jimmy Jeter, are the only two people who have inquired at the NRCS about soil conditions at that site.

Jeter addressed the board next. He praised the board for accomplishments “over the last 15 years or so.” His praise included the idea of a sports complex, which is what was originally built on the Packer Park site. The plan was good, he said, even if many think the implementation was flawed.

Since it was built, some $4.7 million has been spent at Packer Park, much of it to address drainage issues, Jeter said.

Jeter made the case for an alternative site on Veterans Parkway, even as he said he and his group are not wedded to that site.

He argued that improved visibility at the site his group proposed would help deter crime, especially at night, and it would be a source of pride for the community as motorists on the heavily traveled highway would drive past both the proposed high school and the existing Moultrie Tech campus.

The citizens group has already spoken with adjacent landowners, who Jeter said had agreed to allow right-of-way access to North Main Street and Fourth Avenue Northeast so the school could be accessed from those streets instead of the busy Veterans Parkway.

“A majority of the students could get home without their wheels ever touching Veterans Parkway,” Jeter said.

The proposed site would also allow the school system to build a two-story school instead of a four-story one, which Jeter said would be safer and would have fewer disciplinary problems.

“I have talked with teachers who say discipline is a problem in the stairwells (of the existing hgh school),” he said.

Neither members of the board of education nor the architect responded to Lowe and Jeter’s comments at the meeting. The board did write a letter to the editor, published in Tuesday’s Moultrie Observer, that addressed many of the citizens group’s concerns. Click here to read it.

The architect, Walter Altman, and Lyndy Jones, president of JCI, the construction managers on the project, did address the board with their monthly update on the project. The work has been divided into 35 “packages” for bidding, and 28 of those have been done. The projects are bringing in low prices because in the economy, many contractors and subcontractors are hungry for work, he said.

Altman said the project has received state approval, a statement that Lowe challenged but Altman and Jones re-affirmed.

In other action the board:

• Recognized the food service managers at 12 of the system’s 13 schools for award-winning percentages of students who ate breakfast, lunch or both at their schools.

• Approved personnel changes.

• Approved two field trips for gifted students, one to Washington, D.C, and one to Savannah and Atlanta. The board also approved a field trip for C.A. Gray Junior High science students to the planetarium at Florida State University.

• Approved the purchase of two buses from Peach State Freightliner, the low bidder at just over $78,000 each.

• Declared a bus to be surplus property with the plan of using it for parts to repair other buses in the fleet.

• Approved the use of the tennis courts at Packer Park for two U.S.T.A. tournaments.

• Approved several fund-raisers at various schools.