School board gets first look at new Blue Springs School

Homepage

Related Photos

Discussion

November 6, 2009

By Jean Cole The News Courier Fri Nov 06, 2009, 11:40 PM CST

CLEMENTS – Kids heading to the new elementary school next June will likely be enamored by the library. It will feature columns that look like trees and a cozy “story nook” with colored-glass panels.

Parents will like the reinforced steel and cinderblock hallways that will protect their children from storms.

Blue Springs Elementary School, set to open June 2010, will educate students in kindergarten through fifth grade and serve as a feeder school for Clements High School.

Members of the Limestone County school board toured the school Friday. They had to use their imaginations, though. Now under construction off Hardy Road and U.S. 72, the building so far consists of steel beams, cinderblock walls and concrete floors. Workers mill about welding beams and doing electrical work. Yards of electrical cords map the hallways. The gym has only sky above.

Still, the bones of the building are in place, and the plans call for a modern kindergarten-through-fifth school with a metal roof, a gym with bleachers for 600 and separate, after-hours access for the public, hallways assigned a different color for each grade to ease navigation, and a lunchroom with glass block windows that can hold 305 students.

There will be 46 regular classrooms — eight each for grades K-4, six for grade five plus rooms for music, art, computers, reading coach, exceptional education and English as second language.

Pearce Construction of Huntsville is doing the work, and officials are pleased with the results so far.

“They have really come a long way considering the horrible weather we have had for the past three months,” said Architect Jim Hartsell of Davis Architects of Birmingham, the firm that designed the school. “We have been extremely happy with the workmanship on the project. It is the best job we have had recently.”

The winning bid on the project came in at $14.8 million. Officials decided to add two additional classrooms for grades K-4 to prepare for growth, said board member John Wayne King. However, they deleted two alternates to save money — a second playground area and landscaping, said Project Manager Gabrielle Fuller of Davis Architects. The site will be sodded when construction concludes but it will not include shrubbery and trees, she said. School officials hope that will be done as a community project.

The Alabama Department of Transportation has agreed to pay $230,000 to add left- and right-hand turn lanes and an acceleration lane on U.S. 72 to ease traffic congestion.

That work is supposed to begin the week of Nov. 16, according to Pearce Construction.

ALDOT Director Joe McInnes told Superintendent Barry Carroll in June he would reconsider Carroll’s request for a traffic signal at the intersection to improve safety on the busy, undivided highway. No word yet from McInnes. As it stands, the traffic count does not meet federal criteria for a signal, however, Carroll and many others believe ALDOT should make an exception because of the school traffic.