“It is an urgent matter.”
For more than two years now, Lowndes County School District officials have stressed the importance of acting quickly in moving forward with the second phase of its building master plan, the centerpiece of which is a centralized vocational center that would serve students from all three of the district’s high schools.
Urgency was the word that fell from the lips of these officials through not one, but two, bond issues.
County students were already behind, they said, noting Lowndes County is one of just two public school districts without a centralized vocational center available to all students.
It took two bond issues to acquire the funding. In August 2014, voters narrowly rejected the bond issue, even as district officials stressed that a delay in funding the project would make the project more costly.
After the failed bond measure, district officials moved quickly to put the issue before the voters again. Less than eight months after that first vote, a second bond issue was approved by voters.
All systems go, right?
Hardly.
We haven’t seen much urgency on the vocational center since that vote.
In fact, a site hasn’t even been selected.
In its first meeting after the bond passed, project architect Joey Henderson told the board it needed to agree on a site for the vocational school by August in order to keep the project on schedule.
There is still no agreement on where the vocational center will be located.
And for those who are charged with making the project a reality, a sense of frustration has settled over the plans. For each day the project is delayed, building costs may rise. Delays may mean compromising some of the plans for the center, which benefits no one.
The fight to win the approval of district voters was hard-won. It’s not easy to convince voters to spend $44 million tax dollars, after all. In failing to act, the district creates doubt among those who passed the bond despite their reservations.
Frustration is magnified by the knowledge that discussion over the location dates back to at least August 2013 when district superintendent Lynn Wright announced the board had approved site inspections on four possible locations, again stressing the importance of making a decision quickly.
Wright said then it would take 30 days to complete the inspections and urged the board to act quickly once that information was assembled.
“If we started tomorrow, it would take 18 months to two years to complete the project,” he said then.
Now, more than two years later, the board is still arguing over where to locate the vocational center.
We understand board members want to move cautiously in making these kinds of decisions, but at some point, those discussions become not examples of caution, but exercises in futility. Further delays achieve nothing.
Two years is plenty of time to make that choice. The board must reach an agreement on where to build the vocational center.
It is — dare we say it? — an urgent matter.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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