By HEATHER HARTSELL
Leader staff writer
Work on Cabot School District’s ninth elementary school, Mountain Springs Elementary, will soon be under way, Superintendent Dr. Tony Thurman said during last week’s school board meeting.
The board approved the $160,000 purchase of Bill and Mildred Ray’s 16 acres for the new elementary, located a half-mile from the Mountain Springs Road/Hwy. 5 intersection, during the November meeting.
Mountain Springs Elementary, planned to open in the fall of 2010, will help relieve overcrowding at Magness Creek and Northside Elementary schools.
The drives and parking areas for the new campus have been identified and the information is on its way to the Cabot Planning Commission, Thurman said.
The details of getting the utilities to the site are being worked out between the school and the city, as the 16 acres are currently outside the Cabot city limits, he added.
Work is also coming along on schedule at the $11.6 million Cabot Junior High North, planned for completion in July 2009, where crews have been busy painting interior walls, laying block walls and bringing the roof to near completion.
The band hall, choir area and cafeteria only lack a final coat of paint, ceiling tile and floor covering to complete construction.
The kitchen walls have been primed and are ready for wall-coverings; the walk-in coolers and freezers have been set and the floor poured; work on the wall covering and ceiling grid will begin the first week after the holidays.
The exterior block walls of the two-story, 134,000-square-foot structure are complete.
The exterior veneer – a split-faced finish block that covers the structural blocks – is complete on the band hall, cafeteria, offices, media center and kitchen.
The veneer will be 98 percent finished on the rest of the exterior walls by Christmas, Thurman said.
The final 2 percent will be completed after the forklift traffic is no longer necessary.
The metal trusses and metal decking of the roof are completed and the two layers of insulation on top of the decking are 66 percent completed.
“The roof crew was increased last Monday from eight to 15 men in order to speed up the roof completion,” Thurman told the board.
For the first time since the August 2006 fire, the power has been restored to the vocational building, one of the few buildings left intact after the electrical fire destroyed the rest of the eight-year-old campus.
