Several school buses and an elementary school within the Murray County Schools system are set to receive major upgrades after approvals from Murray County Board of Education members at a recent meeting.
The board members voted to approve 7-0 the third and final phase of renovations to Northwest Elementary School, which is part of a larger project envisioned to “modernize” the school that was built in the 1950s, said Superintendent Steve Loughridge.
The final phase, totaling $2,750,110, includes a contract with Carrollton-based RaLin Construction. The renovations will see a complete overhaul of Northwest Elementary’s front office area and kitchen.
“This will complete the construction project that was started back in 2020 with the tornadoes,” said Loughridge.
On Easter weekend in April 2020 an EF-2 tornado rampaged through Northern Murray County, ravaging several homes and causing significant damage to the elementary school’s fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade wing.
After making initial repairs to the school that summer, Loughridge said a decision was made to continue renovating the remainder of the school building through three phases, the first two concluded in 2021 and 2022. Each wing of the school received new flooring, lighting fixtures, bathrooms, cabinetry and state-of-the-art security cameras along with a new paint job to match the remodeled wing damaged by the 2020 tornado.
“Over the past four years we’ve been doing work in different phases to complete it,” Chris Crow, the maintenance director for Murray County Schools, said. “This last phase will really just be remodeling the front office area and kitchen. Not the cafeteria (which was remodeled in 2022), but the kitchen area itself. To my knowledge, the kitchen is the original one from the ’50s, so it needs to be done in a bad way and I know the school is very excited about it.”
Crow said the remodeling of the office and kitchen areas will include “a little bit of mechanical changeout” as well as some re-roofing.
“Our plan is to actually start on some of it in April,” Crow said. “The principal (Amy Petty) and the office staff are really wanting it done. They’re going to move some of their stuff out so we can be doing some demolition in the front office area.”
The kitchen project will likely begin a little later in the year, Crow said.
“We can’t really do too much on it until closer to the summer because you’ve still got the kids around,” he said. “But we want to try to get as much as we possibly can done before school gets out in May. That way the school will have been completely remodeled once school starts back in September.”
Also at the meeting, the board members approved the purchase of six air conditioning units to be installed on Murray County school buses. The units, purchased from Yancey Bus Sales & Service of Macon, have a cost of $13,983.65 each, with the total cost $83,901.90.
Randall Morrison, the director of transportation for Murray County Schools, announced bus driver Jerry Raper as the school system’s first Bus Driver of the Year at the meeting. Morrison said he is excited to spotlight bus drivers and the school bus program in 2024.
“We’ve got a lot of things planned for the upcoming year for our bus drivers,” Morrison said. “We’re looking forward to getting back into the school bus rodeo.”
That includes the potential for a car show hosted by Murray County Schools’ transportation office.
“We’re going to try to plan a car show and invite some other school systems from around to bring their nicest bus, then we’ll have them compete in the car show with the rest of the hot rods,” he said. “We want to be more visible, really. When we do stuff like that, outdoor activities, we want the community to be part of what we’ve got going on.”