Hall County School Board members voted Monday to move forward with the purchase of 17 acres on McEver Road for a new elementary school.
According to officials, the new elementary school is intended to bring together the populations of two existing schools — McEver Elementary and Oakwood Elementary. The combination of the two student bodies will create a single, 1,000-student K-5 school. The exact location of the property is 5226 McEver Road, near the United Methodist Church, north of West Hall Middle School.
Executive Director of Facilities and Construction Matt Cox said the initial plan was to build the new school at the site of one of the existing buildings. After looking at both properties, the board officials decided to take a different approach.
“We looked at property like McEver [elementary school], there were some difficulties there, issues at Oakwood — it's very difficult again because both of those properties are a good size for what they're doing,” Cox said. “But when you try to build another school on the property while they’re occupied, it's difficult to make that work. So we were just concerned that we were going to have a lot of expenses related to that. And so as we've kind of worked through the different situations, one thing that was mentioned was maybe we should look at additional property.”
Cox said building the new school at a third site is similar to what the county has done in the past with the school construction project on White Sulphur Road.
“What we'll do now is we'll go through a 30-day due diligence period where we'll do some checking on a few things,” Cox said. “Just to be sure that that property is appropriate, we’ll begin to go ahead and also do some studies to see how things would fit on the property just to get some early ideas within that 30-day grace period.”
According to the land purchase agreement, the original plat was 27.89 acres. In the new contract, 17.39 acres will be dived out for the school grounds.
Cox said the board is not yet prepared to make any statements or decisions on what will happen with the existing McEver and Oakwood elementary schools and the property they sit on.
