While the Dibrell School expansion project struggles to finish in time for the start of the school year, the new Morrison School project is experiencing smooth sailing, according to school system director of facilities Donnie Caldwell.
Caldwell gave the county’s Education Committee updates on both undertakings at a meeting Monday night.
“I’ll start with Morrison,” said Caldwell. “The contract has been awarded and signed and we’re meeting this  Thursday at 11 a.m. to do our first pre-construction meeting with the contractor.”
Robert S. Biscan and Company of Brentwood turned in the low bid of $8.34 million and was awarded the contract.
“They’re going to be telling us when they’re going to start setting up,” Caldwell said. “The building pad is completely done, it’s ready to start building on. We’ll be going over some of his sub-contractors and his beginning project schedule. I guess next month we’ll probably have a schedule, like we usually get from Dibrell, from them.”
Caldwell said the company did have a proposed finish date, which is under strict scheduling because of the $9 million, no-interest unified school construction bond the county obtained to finance the school, which requires it to be finished in three years.
Caldwell says there has been much progress already.
“They’ve got the grade work done,” Caldwell said. “The building pad is done. They’ve got the two roads cut in. I guess you could say it’s 100 percent complete as far as the first phase.”
Caldwell said the school system is working with Mid State Construction to try and expedite the Dibrell schedule. He presented the committee members a copy of an amended schedule for theDibrell project.
“I met with them again this morning to clean up some of this schedule,” Caldwell said, noting the schedule is broken down by the different wings of the school project, which includes:
• Section A: administration, cafeteria, kitchen wing (new)
• Section B: library, computer, SPED wing (new)
• Section C: gymnasium (new)
• Section D: two-story classroom wing (new)
• Section E1: band, gallery (old cafeteria, kitchen, office area)
• Section E2: bathroom, guidance (old library, office)
“I think the last date on one of them is Sept. 2,” Caldwell said. “It shows cleanup and paving work. The majority of it is supposed to be done by Aug. 30. We’re having a meeting again this Thursday at Dibrell to go over this schedule to see if we can tighten it up some more and to make some other changes.
“You’ll see some dates in there on when we’re starting school,” Caldwell continued. “We met with the state fire marshal last month and he will give us a CO (certificate of occupancy) to start school in the old building if we have it completed, and their goal is to have it completed. We show Aug. 15 on the schedule but we’ve taken a section of the project out now where the old offices used to be. We’re going to leave that alone since they’re going to need that when school starts. We’re going to take that out of the contract, and of course we’re going to get credit for it. We’ll come in later with the maintenance department and try to do some partitions.”
Caldwell says that should push he scheduled up a week or so since Mid State won’t have to be working in there. Caldwell says there is some progress being made in other areas.
“I was out there this morning and they’ve got the bathrooms done, not completely done, but the walls are up and they’re painting them,” Caldwell said.
“They think they get that in there before they start school,” Caldwell said. “And get the fire marshal to approve it so he can give them a CO to move in there. Our goal was to try to get a CO so we can go into part of the new building, but Mr. (Paul) Dixon said he’s not going to allow it because he was afraid if something happened and some kids got into the new wing it could be a safety concern and he didn’t want to sign off it. So he was saying from the old gym back it was going to have to be shut down and make the locks where no kids can enter in there.”
Meanwhile, the weather continues to create some costly problems, the most recent being the flooding of the old gym.
“We had that heavy rain on a Saturday or Sunday night and it did flood it,” Caldwell said. “It warped the gym floor pretty bad and we called Mid State and they’re supposed to correct the problem.”