New opportunities will be coming in about 15 months for Lauderdale County school students after the school board approved a bid Thursday for construction of the district’s new Career and Technical Education Center.
In a 4-0 vote during a regular monthly meeting, the county school board accepted the low bid for the project and awarded the work to Sullivan Enterprises, a construction company based in Magee.
“Real excited to get our foundation built, and that’s what this is going to be, a foundation to be able to build over time,” said Rob Smith, the district’s career and technical education director.
“It is going to be a functional space in the future, and we’ll be able to easily go in and add programs as our local industry and community needs.”
The long-term vision for the CTE Center is to provide career and technical training for students who may not be college bound but want to go straight into a skilled trade out of high school or who want to begin degree or certificate programs that can finished through the community college.
The center also will allow the Lauderdale County School District to consolidate career and technical education programs offered at the four county high schools to one main centrally located campus, opening up the programs to all county students. Currently, students can only take CTE classes offered at their high school or at the Meridian Public School District’s Ross Collins Career and Technical Center.
Last fall, a $12.5 million bond issue to fund the center and its proposed 13 different programs was voted down by county residents, so plans for the center are moving head, but have greatly been scaled down.
The building that will house the CTE Center is the old Peavey Electronics building located on Highway 11/80. Much work needs to be done to the building to renovate it and convert it from a manufacturing plant.
“I think it’s important for us to get this building functional and to get it open and for the public and for our industry to see what the possibilities are,” Smith said.
The base bid for the project was $6,455,000, but board members voted to add some optional alternate projects to the overall work, bringing the total bid to $7,532,000.
“The base bid covers the build out of the building, which would be the programs, the office spaces, the hallways, all of the air conditioning and electrical work, the restrooms, basically the whole functionality of the building,” Smith said.
The base bid also includes a scaled-back front and entranceway to the building.
David Machado of M&P Design met with the school board earlier this week and reviewed the bids received by the district.
“I felt like it was a competitive bid,” he told board members. “I felt like we got some good numbers that came in at the budget we expected.”
Machado presented board members with nine alternate projects that were bid on in case additional funding was available.
Some of board members questioned whether one of the alternate projects to re-roof the building should be more of a priority, but Machado said they had looked at the aging roof and believed it would hold up for several more years.
After much discussion, alternate projects approved by the board include the completion of a conference room/gathering area at the front of the building, some additional millwork throughout the facility and re-skinning, or re-siding, the metal wall panels on the north and south sides of the building.
The construction project is estimated to take about 15 months with the district hoping to have programs operating out of the building by January 2026, Smith said.
Initial programs to be offered at the center include ag power, law and public safety, educator prep and business, marketing and finance.
“If we just add, say one program a year over time, the expense is not going to be great because our building will be built and we are building it in such as manner that basically putting a wall up, a dividing wall, between some of these spaces, is pretty much all it will take,” Smith said.
In other business at the school board meeting, Breelyn Cain, a graduate of West Lauderdale High School, was recognized as one of this year’s recipients of a Walter S. Bounds Scholarship for Excellence from the Mississippi Association of School Superintendents.
Named in honor or veteran educator Walter S. Bounds, the Bounds Scholarship for Excellence rewards top-performing students who excel in leadership, community service and extracurricular activities. Recipients of the $1,000 scholarship must meet certain academic requirements.
Also, architect Arjen Lagendijk gave the school board updates on construction projects at the Clarkdale campus and said roofing projects at Northeast elementary and high school, West Lauderdale middle and high school, and Southeast elementary and high school are expected to begin any day.
The upper elementary Building 300 at Clarkdale, which received extensive damage from tornadoes in 2022, is basically completed and teachers have moved into the classrooms, he said. Exterior work to Building 300 and Building 200 is also finishing up. They are still waiting for room signs to come in for Building 300, but it will not take long to install them, he added.
Lagendijk did ask board members to approve work to replace the ceiling in Clarkdale’s cheer gym, which apparently was overlooked when the project began but was included in the insurance coverage. Lighting salvaged from the north end of the building will be installed in the cheer gym in addition to the new ceiling. Board members approved his request 4-0.