New school site chosen

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Proposed school location, click on graphic for a larger.

Staff

Columbia County has found a site for its next new elementary school.

Though the purchase of the land had not been completed, School Superintendent Tommy Price said the school will be on about 20 acres on Mullikin Road near the Conn Road intersection.

The Columbia County School Board on Tuesday night approved a contract with One Source Development L.L.C. to develop the site plan.

The site work is scheduled to begin May 1 and is expected to cost $1.2 million, Price said.

The board also hired Hughes Beattie O'Neill Law & Associates Architects-Planners to oversee the construction of the 36-room school.

The design of the school will be nearly identical to Lewiston Elementary School, which opened in 2003. The new school, which will relieve Riverside, Stevens Creek and Greenbrier elementary schools, is expected to open its doors for the 2005-2006 school year.

Also at Tuesday's meeting, school officials adopted stricter rules for student behavior on field trips.

The move follows an incident that occurred during a Lakeside High School debate-team outing during this school year.

"You always think you have got adequate rules and regulation in place, but then something like this comes up," Price told the board.

During the debate-team field trip, a boy and a girl were caught together in the same hotel room. In their defense, they claimed they were never told it wasn't allowed.

As punishment, they were suspended until the end of the third nine weeks, with the option of attending the Crossroads Academy alternative school, and they were not allowed to participate in any extracurricular activities.

The students appealed the tribunal ruling, and though the board upheld the findings, they agreed to limit the suspension through the remainder of the first semester, with the students still not able to participate in any extracurricular activities for the rest of the year, including the junior-senior prom. The girl is a sophomore.

Parents now will have to sign a form saying they understand student behavioral expectations on field trips and that their children can be sent home and disciplined for not following them. The new rules establish a chaperone-to-child ratio of no more than one-to-10.

Among the new rules, students must sleep in their assigned rooms and not be in a room of someone of the opposite sex unless there is a chaperone present. Chaperones are allowed to perform random room checks, and students are not allowed to leave the hotel without a chaperone.