Polk School Superintendent Dr. Darrell Sorrells announced that 20 acres of land, located just off of the Cartersville Highway, had been purchased in anticipation of building a new middle school.
But actually building the school facility hinges on the outcome of the Sept. 20 SPLOST vote, Sorrells said.
“Everything depends on the SPLOST,” he commented. “If the SPLOST passes, we’ll start work on it. If it fails, we won’t be able to build it.”
The land purchased totaled $300,000, Sorrells said, and seemed like a good fit for the proposed school. “We will be able to share some athletic facilities with the high school but we’ll also be building fields and facilities for the new school as well,” he said.
The new middle school would cost an estimated $13 million to complete and the blueprints would call for an easy design, “one that could be added on to easily to accommodate growth,” Sorrells said.
Sorrells said the current middle school, Elm Street, would eventually be phased out.
Members of the board voted to make the construction of a new Rockmart Middle School their top priority at a special meeting in June.
Their second priority is a complete renovation of Cedartown High School and a 15-room addition to the facility.
The board set the construction of a new Goodyear Elementary as their third priority, followed by classroom additions to Cherokee Elementary, Eastside Elementary and Westside Elementary.
Hoping to alleviate major congestion problems around several local schools, the board set traffic improvements as their fifth priority.
All these changes come with a price tag of $34.2 million. Eighteen million of that will come from the proposed SPLOST and $1.8 million comes from current SPLOST funds.
There are other available pots of money that will be used to fund the project – namely $11 million earned by the district in state funding and $500,000 in funds passed down from the state that can only be used for renovation.
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