The Newton Municipal School District Board of Trustees will be voting Thursday to decide if it will begin the process for holding a bond issue referendum to finance construction of a new elementary school and a new high school competition gymnasium with an estimated price tag of $20 million.
Newton Municipal School District Superintendent Glenda Nickson said she and other district officials have been holding meetings with stakeholders in the district on how to improve the school districts. During those discussions, the idea of building a new elementary school and a new gymnasium have come up as they have showed off many of the upgrades that are happening on each of the new campuses.
Currently, they are making district-wide roof repairs, window replacement for energy efficient , installation of air purification systems, baseball field house upgrade, different middle school projects in replacement of doors, heating and cooling, the CTE being renovated and a district-wide surveillance cam system and audio-visual upgrades. Most of that is being done by ESSER funds and other grant opportunities.
And Nickson said they have wanted to look beyond the completion of those upgrades and trying to look to the future. She said stakeholders have been interested in building a new elementary and high school.
“So we asked them with all these renovations that we have currently going on there, why not look to the future and look at a new construction of our elementary school, as well as our high school?” Nickson said. “And so when we asked them, why not?”
Nickson said if they were to look at building a new elementary school and a new competition gym or “champions complex” as she called it, they would not be able to use ESSER funds to do new construction. The only way to raise the kind of funds would be to have a bond issue, which would require a referendum to raise property taxes to pay for a bond issue.
Because of this, the district has been retained Government Consultants, Inc. to help facilitate the process. Nnamdi Thompson said they are a municipal advisory firm that has a fiduciary federally mandated obligation to the school district.
Preliminary estimates on the project would be about $20 million for both projects with a projected length of the bond for 30 years. He laid out a process for the board to follow if they were to move forward with a bond issue. He recommended that the district hire an architect and a bond attorney. The architect would draw up plans for the project completed.
“That is one thing that you will need to do is to hire an architect if you want to move forward with the project,” Thompson said. “The architect would have to be paid up front. We would not paid until the bond actually goes to sale. The same thing for the bond attorney. They would not be paid until the bonds are sold.
“You need 60% in order for a school bond issue to go anywhere. Everything else inside of Mississippi is 50% plus one vote, but I also want to make sure we’re clear in Mississippi, school bond issues have to have a 60% in order to pass.”
Nickson said that no decision has been made on anything at this time. The locations of where the new construction could be have not been finalized. If the new elementary school is approved, one proposed location is building it where the current high school baseball field is located so that the current school building could be used during construction. The new gymnasium could either be built on the high campus between the band hall and cafeteria or it could be constructed on the football practice field. Those decisions would be made later in the process, Nickson said.
She wanted to bring this to the board during a work session last week to see if there was any interest in moving forward.
The trustees will be considering several resolutions to be move forward this bond issue discussion.
Also in the discussions, the stakeholders also agreed that the district should revise its mission statement slightly. She proposed that the new district statement reads, “All students will graduate from Newton Municipal School District college or career ready whatever it takes.”
Nickson said they should add the “whatever it takes” to show that the district will do whatever it takes to serve the needs of their students.
