A little less than a month after accepting a $963,000 bid for improvements to the restrooms at Oak Grove Middle School, members of the Lamar County School District Board of Trustees have declined a $2.98 million bid for similar measures throughout the rest of the district’s schools.
District superintendent Steven Hampton said the bid was turned down at the December 11 board meeting because it came in somewhat higher than officials expected.
“The first bid was for Oak Grove Middle School only, to see what type of quotes we’d get, what type of interest we’d have,” he said. “It’s different from building a building or something like that, because it’s bathrooms, so we quoted out Oak Grove Middle School first.
“Because we got three bids on that one, we went ahead and quoted out the remainder of the bathrooms, from Sumrall High School, Purvis High School, Oak Grove Elementary, and then a few bathrooms here and there from our other campuses. But we only got one bid (for those), and it was much higher than what we received on Oak Grove Middle School, so we turned it down.”
School board officials are now expected to advertise for bids again in January, shortly after the start of the new year in 2024.
Back in September, the board approved a slate of improvement projects, which entail improvements to the restrooms throughout the district’s 17 campuses. Officials chose to start with the facilities at Oak Grove Middle School and Oak Grove Elementary School, which Hampton said are the oldest and the most in need of repair, before continuing work at the other campuses.
“(Our restrooms) are older, and it’s just normal wear and tear,” he said in a previous story. “A lot of the dividers are the main problem, but we’re actually going in and looking at flooring, walls, putting in new vanities, new lavatories.
“We’ll have new toilets, new urinals – we’re really outfitting them to get them nicer for our students.”
At the November 13 board meeting, officials accepted the aforementioned $963,000 bid from Sons Construction LLC to begin that process at Oak Grove Middle School.
“That work has not started yet; it’s in process,” Hampton said. “It’s one of those things where it’s getting ready.
“From what I understand, they’ll begin that shortly after the new year. We’ve already signed contracts on Oak Grove Middle School, and so the red tape – the paperwork – has been done, and we’re just waiting on them to begin construction work.”
The project is helped by a $750,000, zero-percent interest loan from the Mississippi Department of Education, which was approved at the latest session of the Mississippi Legislature. That loan will be paid off over the course of the next 10 years, and the school district will fund the remaining cost of the project from its budget.
“(That loan) won’t even cover half the cost,” Hampton said. “We’re still bidding out the whole project, but that will definitely help us get started on the project.
“We’re going to combine that with district funds, and I can’t give you an exact dollar amount on that because we haven’t had in bid out. I know it’s going to be in excess of a million dollars, and so until we get our bids back, we won’t know (the cost) exactly. But we have $750,000 to get us started, and we’ll be combining that with district funds to get the bathrooms renovated.”
Work will be completed in phases to avoid shutting all the restrooms in one building down at the same time.
“It’ll be an ongoing project to get those restrooms,” Hampton said. “We can’t do all bathrooms at the same time on one campus, so we’ll have to do one bathroom at a time at Oak Grove Middle School, so that we can still operate and have classes and those things.
“We can’t shut down all facilities at one time, so we’ll have to rotate through them.”
