MOULTRIE, Ga. — Architects for the Colquitt County School System announced proposals for school improvements during a public meeting Tuesday evening. 

By the architects’ own admission, the proposals will be very expensive, so they and school leaders wanted to brief the public and get feedback before the Board of Education even decides whether to accept the proposals.

The facility review, which began last spring, is designed to help the board set its priorities as far as renovating, upgrading or replacing existing schools, according to Leah Jones of Altman & Barrett Architects.

The architects’ recommended priorities involve three schools: 

• C.A. Gray Junior High, which will need to be completely replaced.

• Willie J. Williams Middle School, which will require demolition of some outbuildings and relatively minor renovation.

• Norman Park Elementary, which will need to be completely replaced but probably won’t be.

School Superintendent Ben Wiggins said the public hearing was the beginning of discussions about the proposals. No decisions had been made, and he said even if they were made immediately, actual construction couldn’t start before the summer of 2024 because of funding processes. The school system is about half-way through the current Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (ESPLOST), so it will be at least several months and probably more than a year before the board will ask voters to consider renewing it; some of the money for the proposed construction would come from the state but some would come from the next ESPLOST, if it’s approved by voters.

C.A. Gray Junior High School

Altman & Barrett offered two possible processes to replace C.A. Gray Junior High School, but it was clear that architects favored moving the school from its current location in Northwest Moultrie to vacant land across the road from Colquitt County High School.

Issues with the current site include detached buildings, which create multiple courtyards that make it difficult to transition from one class to another and difficult for administrators to monitor. The buildings are aging out, Jones said, but the campus’s size is what encourages the plan to move the school entirely.

“The main issue with C.A. Gray’s current campus is it is short almost 10 acres from the state minimum,” Jones said.

The State of Georgia’s rule is a middle school campus must be 12 acres plus one acre for each 100 students. C.A. Gray’s population of 1,363 students means it should be 25.63 acres, but the campus is only 16 acres.

The school has a recently renovated gymnasium, but there’s no room on the campus for outdoor athletics, such as football practice. Those teams have to be bussed to Packer Park to practice.

Because the school is completely surrounded by residential developments, there’s no room to expand the campus. Rebuilding it on the same site will require a state waiver of the minimum acreage requirement, Jones said. The new building would have to be compact and multi-story.

In addition, all the students, teachers and administrators would have to be moved to 42 modular classrooms while the building is torn down and the new one built, a process that Jones said could take between two and two-and-a-half years. Since the school houses only two grades, some students could spend their entire C.A. Gray experience in the modular classrooms.

Building on the same site would be significantly more expensive, Jones said, in part because of extra safety precautions that would have to be put in place as construction would be going on so close to where children would be attending class. She refrained from speculating on actual cost, since no building plan has been put forth, but she estimated for every dollar spent on a new building elsewhere, rebuilding on the same site would cost $1.50.

By contrast, the school system already owns 45 acres south of Colquitt County High School on Darbyshire Road. Jones said that would allow the system to build a school to meet students’ needs with room to expand. Athletic facilities would be within walking distance either on the proposed junior high site or across the street at Packer Park. And the new site would offer opportunities for C.A. Gray students to participate in Career, Technical and Agricultural Education programs at the high school, she said.

Students would be able to continue in the current C.A. Gray while the new school is being built, so there would be no need for modular classrooms, she said.

The biggest reason to keep the school where it is, Jones said, is its status as one of the few remaining community schools in the county.

“You’re going to remove it from being a community school,” she said, “and that needs to be part of the conversation.”

If the junior high moves to Darbyshire Road, the architects propose to use the existing school campus for a community center. It has a top-notch kitchen and a good gymnasium as well as other usable facilities.

Wiggins said no community group has been contacted about the facility. School officials wanted Tuesday’s meeting to be the introduction of the proposal, which would put all community groups on an equal footing if they’re interested in taking it over — whether buying the site or renting it from the school system.

Willie J. Williams Middle School

In contrast to C.A. Gray, the Willie J. Williams Middle School proposal seems minor. 

Traffic congestion needs to be improved, Jones said. She said the architects are working on that challenge but offered no suggestions Tuesday.

Three detached buildings near the Colquitt County Arts Center are significantly older than the rest of the campus and need to be demolished, Jones said. The renovation would need to make a place in the main building for the students now housed in the detached buildings.

The existing cafeteria cannot serve all WJW’s students at one time, she said, so it will need an upgrade.

Norman Park Elementary School

The other big project discussed Tuesday was tearing down Norman Park Elementary School and building a new school on the same campus.

Opened 65 years ago, the school is the oldest in the county still in use, Jones said. It was designed in a different time — most of the classrooms open directly to the outside of the building. That creates two problems: power expenses and student safety.

Whenever an exterior door is opened, the building loses heat in winter or air conditioning in warmer weather. That drives up the cost to heat and cool it.

The doors leading directly outside make it easier for a student to leave the building when they aren’t supposed to or for someone with harmful intent to get in. Wiggins said the entire school is surrounded by a fence, however, which does mitigate the safety concern somewhat.

Jones said no renovation could change the location of the doors. Fixing that would require a complete rebuild.

Structurally, the building has been well-maintained, she said, but a problem lies underground where aging infrastructure — electrical wires and plumbing — are hard to access.

No one challenged the problems of the current building, but Jones said it won’t be replaced because of the state’s funding mechanism.

The Georgia Department of Education pays most of the money to build new schools, and it has a number of rules about what it will pay for and what it won’t. One of those involves the number of students, both in the school and in the school system.

Jones said at the elementary level, the state shoots for 600 students at each school. Below about 350, the state questions whether the school has enough students to justify expenses, and below 200, funding is hard to get.

Norman Park Elementary is in a sweet spot with about 550, but the system has a handful of schools with fewer than 350 students. Jones said the state won’t pay to build a new school as long as its calculations show more available space than is justified by the number of students.

“For a new Norman Park you will need to re-evaluate all your other schools,” she said.

A member of the audience asked if that meant the state was forcing the system to consolidate schools. Jones said the state isn’t forcing the system to do anything, but it isn’t going to pay for a new school when there’s room available elsewhere in the system.

Feedback

The school system held Tuesday’s public meeting in part to get community feedback about the major projects that the architects proposed. 

Some attendees complained that it was not sufficiently advertised. Wiggins said the school system and each individual school posted multiple times on social media, it was posted to the system website and it was published in The Moultrie Observer. The information was provided to two area television stations, he said, but the school system can’t control what they do with that information.

The school system recorded Tuesday’s meeting and the video will be available on the system’s website soon, colquitt.k12.ga.us.

Members of the public are encouraged to let the school system know what they think about the proposal. Visit https://forms.gle/ALgz841bc9Tne6hM7 to share your thoughts.