LaGRANGE- The firm to design the county’s newest elementary school has been chosen.

At Thursday night’s Troup County Board of Education meeting, the board named Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood as the architectural firm that will be handling construction for the new Elementary School “A” that will be built on South Davis Road and replace Whitesville Road Elementary School – which is approximately 3.1 miles from the new location.

Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood is one of the largest architecture and engineering firms in the southeast region. GMC provides professional services associated with architecture, interior design, civil, geotechnical, electrical, structural and environmental engineering, landscape architecture, transportation, airport planning, master planning, surveying, and construction administration.

“The Board has chosen an architect to design the new elementary school “A”,” said John Radcliffe, the assistant superintendent for Maintenance and Operations for Troup County Schools. “We’ll start meeting next week with the architect; they’ve already seen the land, and were going to start working with curriculum people to design the programs that will go into the school. We’ve looked at maybe eight, 10 elementary schools around a couple of states to see what’s out there and we kind of narrowed it down to one or two schools. What we want to do is use those as our straw man approach and build out from there.”

“Once they agree to the architecture design for the school, we’ll bring it back to the board and they will bid the project. We’ll bring it back to the board for construction approval for the project itself and then the construction will begin.”

Over the next 60 days, the school board will be looking to come up with a plan for the construction project. Radcliffe said he does not know exactly how much money is being put into the architecture project but mentioned they currently have $18 million dollars reserved in their SPLOST (special-purpose, local-option sales tax) Initiative. However, the board is looking to spend far less than that for this particular project.

There has been no decision made yet on what the new elementary school will be named but the goal is for the school to open in 2018.

“Whitesville Road Elementary School was one of the schools that was evaluated about four years ago, along with Ethel W. Kight Elementary School, and Ethel Kight has been replaced already,” said Radcliffe. “Whitesville Road is a school that needs to be replaced and it would be more than 50 percent of its current value to repair it and replace it, so it’s a decision to go ahead and build a new school.”

 

Shirttail- Reach James Simpson II at 706-884-7311, ext. 2155, or by email at james.simpson@lagrangenews.com