After a final phase of scheduled renovations, students at Northwest Elementary School will soon walk the halls of what will essentially be a completely new facility.
When a near 135 mph EF-2 tornado wreaked havoc across Northern Murray County in April 2020, Northwest Elementary was one of several structures severely impacted.
After initial refurbishments and a pair of renovation projects at the school during the past four years, the third and final phase of renovations was approved during a Murray County Board of Education meeting.
Scheduled to begin in April, these renovations will see the front office and kitchen areas completely remodeled, capping off a complete overhaul of the school that was built in 1956 to make it more modern and work efficient.
The cost of the final phase of construction is $2,750,110, said Murray County Schools Director of Maintenance Chris Crow.
Time to rebuild
Superintendent Steve Loughridge said the school was “severely damaged” by the tornado, with a large portion of the roof and several windows “blown away.”
“There was a lot of damage to the gym area and the upper elementary wing where the sixth-grade, fifth-grade and some fourth-grade classrooms are,” he said. “The good thing was that it happened on a weekend and no students were there, but we were also shut down for COVID(-19) during that time, which helped in a way because we could not have held school there otherwise.”
Loughridge said the school system began immediate repairs.
“Of course, we were covered under insurance for tornadoes, so we worked with our insurance company and a construction company to get the damage repaired as soon as possible,” he said. “Thankfully, they were able to start fairly soon, so we felt pretty confident in getting it back and functioning as soon as we possibly could.”
Because of the age of the building, Loughridge said talks began about applying for capital outlay funding from the Georgia Department of Education, known as a five-year facilities plan, that allows for the full remodeling of facilities once they reach a certain age.
“And Northwest met that criteria,” he said.
The initial renovations and repairs began in the spring of 2020 and continued into that summer.
“Then, we realized we were going to go back to school after the end of the COVID lockdown, but we weren’t going to have all the damage repaired,” Loughridge said. “So, we had to rent some mobile units, and about half of the school were in those mobile units for a few months.”
Northwest Elementary Principal Amy Petty, who was assistant principal during the initial renovations in 2020, said having almost half the student population — which equals roughly 500 children — in outside mobile units during the beginning of that school year was an “interesting” experience.
“We just kind of had a little community out there,” Petty said.
While the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade students studied in mobile units, work began on repairing the upper elementary wing of the school, which had been impacted the most by the tornado.
“Our music, speech and ELL (English Language Learners) classes were all out in our mobile units as well,” Petty said. “We had to go outside the building through our walkway just to get to those classrooms. It’s funny, the kids were so resilient. They came back to school and were like ‘OK, this is what we’re doing now.’ We taught them new procedures, and we just figured it out until we could all get back in the building together. We celebrated when everybody was back inside the building. We’ve come a long way.”
Beginning phases
Soon after, the first phase of renovations to the remaining half of the school began.
“Phase one renovated a wing of the school where some of the upper elementary was with roof repairs, new HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), new flooring, new windows, new toilets, and we put LVT (luxury vinyl tile) flooring throughout the whole school,” Loughridge said. “We also replaced light fixtures, and we installed a new state-of-the-art camera system.”
Phase two began in the summer of 2022 and saw an overhaul of the kindergarten through third-grade wings.
“They got renovated restrooms, HVAC, lights, cabinetry, all those things,” Loughridge said. “That basically got the entire school from the media center to all the classrooms, restrooms and the cafeteria, but not the kitchen area or the office area. That’s what this phase three is doing. Then, it will be totally done.”
Funding came from both capital outlay money and the current ESPLOST (Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax), Loughridge said.
The SPLOST and ESPLOST are 1% sales taxes. The SPLOST can be used to fund capital projects for the county and the cities of Chatsworth and Eton. The ESPLOST can be used to fund capital projects for Murray County Schools.
“The renewal of our SPLOST funding (this past November) was a big help, because a majority of this would have to be paid with SPLOST. Right now, we hope to be started on the final phase project sometime in late April, or least have the outside work done. Then when school is out, the contractors will move to the interior parts.”
Loughridge said repairing the parts of the school that impact students the most was the priority.
“So we left the kitchen and office area for last,” he said. “With the shortness of time you have to do something, you have to do them over the summers while children and staff are out.”
Loughridge said he hopes to have the final renovations finished by the summer and in time for the 2024-25 school year, which begins in September.
A tight-knit community
While the recent renovations are the largest of their kind to the school building since its opening, the school did receive an initial renovation in 1997, when the kindergarten, first-grade and second-grade wing was added.
“But there was very little done to the kitchen area,” Loughridge said. “Some of that original structure was built in the ’50s, so we’re going to try to modernize that and open it up a little more, and make it a little more functional for them with this last phase.”
Petty said the remodeled kitchen area will be a great help for the cafeteria workers.
“Right now, the kitchen is just little rooms here and there,” she said. “Modern kitchens are more open, but this one has a lot of separate rooms. It’s going to be a lot better when they get that finished. It should be a more open space and much easier to cook for a large number of students. Those ladies work hard trying to make sure everybody gets fed.”
Petty, whose office is at the front of the building and is scheduled to be renovated next month, said the office staff are just as excited to receive a larger work space once the renovations are complete.
She said the current plan is to relocate the front office to the school’s media center once the remodeling begins.
“We’re flexible, that’s just our community up here,” Petty said. “We do what we have to do to make things work. The media center is the plan because it has an outside door that parents can come in and we can also close areas off that we need to. We’ve got boxes and we’re ready to go any time they tell us.”
She said it will be great to have a “total facelift” of the school.
“We take a lot of pride in our building, and it’s just nice,” Petty said. “This school’s been here a long time and it’s got a lot of history. People that come in, some of them will say they went to school here or their parents went to school here. We’ve built that sense of community, and when the building was almost destroyed by the tornado, that community was quick to help bring us back. We’ve been through a lot, but I feel like it’s brought us together as a faculty. We’re just a good, strong group of teachers here.”