Now that the Stokes County Board of Education has a site for a new elementary school, board members are working to make sure they are ready to build as soon as county commissioners provide money for the school.
Until a specific site was chosen, school officials could go only so far with plans. At its regular meeting on Monday, the Stokes County Board of Commissioners voted to provide $1.3 million to buy 62 acres on N.C. 66 south of Mountain View Road.
With the site set, school-board members began yesterday the process of looking at possible plans for the school and deciding where on the site to build it. There is enough land to build a middle school there sometime in the future, so the placement of the elementary school needs to be done with that in mind.
"I want to be ready to move," Stewart Hobbs, the school system's superintendent, said at the school board's monthly work session.
Board Member Sonya Cox said that having a site puts the board in a better position to provide more specific cost estimates to county commissioners.
In part because the commissioners wanted specific rather than general estimates, they have not yet provided the money to build an elementary school -- which, with a capacity of about 500 students, would relieve overcrowding at King and Mount Olive elementary schools -- or to restore or replace Nancy Reynolds Elementary School.
School officials have been using rough estimates of about $25 million total for both projects. With the downturn in the economy and construction companies looking for business, school officials think that the projects could now be done for less, and have been urging commissioners to provide the money sooner rather than later.
Thomas W. Hughes of SFL+A, the architecture firm working with the school system on capital projects, said yesterday that projects that were once $145 a square foot are now in the $130s.
The school board is also in the process of deciding how to proceed with Nancy Reynolds. At the Monday meeting, commissioners authorized $1.04 million to buy pods for students there to use while the school is being restored or replaced and to buy the additional land needed for a new septic system.
Specific plans for the Nancy Reynolds project await a report from Ersoy Brake Appleyard Architects, a Winston-Salem company that has worked on historic restorations at such schools at Old Town Elementary and Reynolds High.
Leon Inman, the chairman of the board of commissioners, said that once the school board has solid plans for Nancy Reynolds in hand, he thinks that commissioners will be ready to provide the money for that project. They could also be ready to provide the money for the new elementary school after the state passes its budget in July and the county knows what it will be getting.
"We are going to proceed cautiously," Inman said. "I'm excited about the fact that we have gotten started."
He added that the commissioners have not forgotten about the need for additions and renovations at Southeastern Stokes Middle School -- the No. 3 project on school board's capital-improvements list.
Yesterday, school-board members decided to decline an offer from the members of the Nancy Reynolds Historical Committee to have another architectural firm look at the school.
The committee was formed to persuade school-board members to restore Nancy Reynolds rather than replace it. As part of those efforts, the committee invited Steve Onxley, a Charlotte architect who has done renovations of historic properties, to speak to the school board in December.
Members went on to offer to have architects associated with Onxley look at Nancy Reynolds. But the consensus among the board members was that they would prefer to stick only with Ersoy Brake Appleyard. The committee members at the meeting said they were fine with that.
■ Kim Underwood can be reached at 727-7389 or at kunderwood@wsjournal.com,
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