Students, faculty and staff of the Lamar County School District can soon look forward to more than $1 million worth of improvements to the restrooms throughout the district’s 17 campuses, as the school district’s board of trustees recently voted to advertise bids for that project.
The measure was approved at the September 14 board meeting, where superintendent Steven Hampton said officials will start with the facilities at Oak Grove Middle School and Oak Grove Elementary School, which are the oldest and most in need of repair, before continuing with work at the other campuses.
“(Our restrooms) are older, and it’s just normal wear and tear,” Hampton said. “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.”
The project will be 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.”
Bids are expected to be advertised in the near future.
“I imagine it will be pretty soon,” Hampton said. “I don’t have a date on when it will go to bid … but it will be the typical public information as far as the bid cycle.”
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.”
