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School board gets break on price of two pods to be used in Pinnacle
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Students at Nancy Reynolds Elementary School in Danbury will use pod classrooms while the building is restored.
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Published: March 5, 2009
DANBURY - One fringe benefit of the economic downtown is that the two pods for students at Nancy Reynolds Elementary School to study in while their school is being restored will cost $60,000 less than projected.
At the Stokes County Board Education's work session on Tuesday, David Burge, the school system's director of operations, presented bids for the two modular classrooms that the school system will station at Pinnacle Elementary School for Nancy Reynolds students during the 2009-2010 school year.
He recommended that the board buy two pods made by Sunshine Manufactured Structures Inc. in Rockwell and sold through M Space Holding in Garner at a cost of $660,878 each, which is about $30,000 less than projected. With the school system buying two, that will bring the total savings to $60,000.
Burge attributed the lower cost to the recession.
"These guys are hungry for business," Burge said. "Their plants aren't operating at capacity."
Because the school system will have such additional costs as installing water, electrical and sewer systems, the total cost of putting the pods in place will still be about $1 million.
At Pinnacle, one of the pods will be installed behind the school building and the other will be installed on the soccer field. After the Nancy Reynolds students return to their restored school, the pod behind the Pinnacle building will remain to help relieve overcrowding there, and the one on the soccer field will be moved to relieve overcrowding at another school.
Although the school board won't formally approve the purchase of the pods until its March 16 meeting, board members indicated that Burge should go ahead with the process.
"What I'm targeting is for these pods to be delivered by May 1," he said.
At the March 16 meeting, the board will also vote on which days to use to make up for the two days lost to snow earlier this week.
On Tuesday, board members were talking about shortening the spring break by two days and using April 16 and April 17 as makeup days.
In acknowledging the difficulty of finding days that would please everyone, school Superintendent Stewart Hobbs said, "No matter what you do, somebody is going to be upset."
Kim Underwood can be reached at 727-7389 or at kunderwood@wsjournal.com.
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