School board eyes upgrades to campuses

Published 8:00 pm Tuesday, August 7, 2012

As students began a new year Monday, Lincoln County School District trustees discussed improvements at several campuses.

     During last night’s board meeting, Superintendent Terry Brister said there were no major problems related to the start of school earlier in the day.

     “We had a few kinks here and there, but that’s going to happen,” he said. “We’ll get them all worked out.”

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     In other activity, Brister told the board that work on improvements to a parking lot at Loyd Star Attendance Center would begin soon. Dickerson and Bowen will do the work at a cost of $219,000, he said.

     Brister said the school needed to wait until July to get things going with the project.

     “We get our new budget in July, and we have to wait until that happens to get started on things in the new year,” he said. “We’ve been working on this for a while and we would have liked to have started sooner, but we couldn’t.”

     No finish date has been set for the improvements. Brister said it would depend on the weather.

     Another pending project the board is working on is an improvement to the student pick-up and drop-off road at Enterprise Attendance Center. Brister said the original road that was used had to be closed at the last minute.

     “Our original plan was to leave it open until we had to close it, but the builders of the new gym said they wanted to close it for safety concerns at our pre-construction meeting,” he said.

     The current way people are exiting the campus after pickup and dropoff is in a way that presents a blind spot to the driver, which Brister said they are working to rectify.

     “This came to us as a surprise, but we are working on it,” he said.

     The Lincoln County School District is working with the Mississippi Department of Transportation and District Three Supervisor Nolan Earl Williamson about building a new road that comes out on a hill and grants greater visibility.

     Also Monday, the board approved asking for 21 additional school bus turnarounds to aid in transportation. Officials said more have been added previously and more could be added in the future, if needed.