MOULTRIE, Ga. – Renovations at Doerun Elementary are nearly finished and are expected to be completed when students head to their classrooms on Monday, Aug. 14, the first day of school.

A more extensive renovation at Odom Elementary is continuing and should be completed in October or November, Schools Superintendent Doug Howell said following Monday’s Board of Education meeting.

A construction project at Colquitt County High School also is still under way and is expected to be finished in December.

All of the projects are on schedule.

“They are going exactly as they were planned,” Howell said. “And they are on budget or under budget.”

The first day of school was moved back a week from the originally scheduled Aug. 7, to give crews extra time to work on the renovation and construction projects before students begin attending classes.

School board member Pat Anderson said she visited Doerun Elementary recently and said she was pleased with the work done there.

“It is wonderful,” she said “I was in awe of how good it looks.”

The school has received a new kitchen and cafeteria, a new front office complex and each classroom is getting new tile and paint.

The Odom project is more extensive and was not originally planned to be finished by the first day of school.

The school was built in 1986 as the first Quality Based Education (QBE) school in Georgia and had between 400 and 450 students when it opened. It now holds between 650 and 700 students.

Odom will get a new gymnasium and the old gymnasium is being renovated to serve as the cafeteria. The former cafeteria will become the media center.

The school also is receiving a new kitchen, improvements to classrooms, two new paved parking lots and some duct and air conditioning work.

At the high school, work is continuing on an addition that will include an 8,000-square-foot weight room, locker rooms, meeting rooms and offices for coaches, training room, the athletic director’s office and a more accessible ticket office, a conference room, a kitchen and dining area for athletes and four special education classrooms.

The 100-yard indoor multi-purpose facility also is still under construction.

Work on the new $1 million track, with an adjacent area for field events, is nearing completion, Howell said. The artificial turf football field inside the track has already been completed.

The board on Monday approved construction of a rest rooms/concessions/storage building that will be located between the track and indoor facility that will allow concessions to be sold during track meets.

Those high school projects are expected to be completed in December.

Howell said plans are to move football operations from the current field house next to the former high school to the new facility during the Christmas break and to have everything in place when schools reopen in January.

Once completed, the projects will result in the high school having a gymnasium, an auxiliary gymnasium, a track, a multi-purpose facility, three soccer fields, two baseball fields, a softball field and lighted tennis courts on campus.

Howell also noted that the Colquitt County football team’s annual preseason scrimmage will be held at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 10, on the Tom White Field at Mack Tharpe Stadium.

That is the same evening as the school system’s Open House, during which students and parents can visit schools and meet teachers and administrators before classes begin the following Monday.

Howell said that Open House has evolved into what he characterized as a “big social night,” with families visiting schools and then going out to eat.

He envisions the football scrimmage against Coffee enhancing the evening.

He said that Open House at Willie J. Williams Middle School, which is across from the stadium, will be over by 6-6:30 p.m., well before kickoff.

The school board will meet next at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 7, for a work session. The next regular school board meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 28.

Both meetings will be in the board room, which is the former media center at the old Colquitt County High School.

The meetings are open to the public.