School board agrees to build bus garage, Sparta classrooms

A month after the beginning of the school year, the members of the Alleghany County Board of Education resolved Aug. 7 to begin putting bids out for the bus garage, and pending commissioner approval, adding eight classrooms in the kindergarten-second grade wing of Sparta School. The tentative phase two will include renovations on the remaining elementary schools, while the actual construction of the determined middle school concept will be the third phase.

In terms of the fate of the middle school concept, the members of the board have resolved to have a meeting Sept. 21 at 4 p.m. to make a decision as to which direction the school system will take in constructing a middle school. Decisions that remain include whether it will be on the Sparta School site or on a separate site, as well as whether it will contain sixth through eighth grade or seventh and eighth grades.

Representative Frank Williams with Pinnacle Architecture in Charlotte spoke first of the bus garage location.

“When we got the survey, I just laid it over where the bus garage is going and then started working a few contours just to see if we could get enough soil out of this field where the barn is...to maybe build up this area to help get that bus garage up to the level that the other building is. We can get a level ball field, the same level the existing baseball field is, so you can get an idea,” Williams said. “We’ll do soil testing next week. To get prepared and put it out to bid, it might take us about two-and-half or three weeks.

“With that type building, the grading will actually take as long as it will to get the building up. It will really go fast after we get the grading done.”

Board member Clarence Crouse then asked, “So the earth moving will take place between what I call the Truitt property up to the location of the garage?”

Answering, Williams said, “Actually, what we’d have is a bank similar to the one behind the third base dugout; that will just continue right up the road and right on around the bus garage. Later on when we get some more of this property, we can tear this down and put more playing fields.”

Turning the attention to the rock located near the pre-kindergarten through second grade building at Sparta, Williams said, “What is expensive about a rock and a building project is when you don’t know it’s there. If we know where that rock is, we can take it out pretty easily. I looked at the contours of the rock outcrop and the street to see what we can do with getting some more stack space there. We get a parking lot in here and drive around in any type of zig-zag fashion to get the cars off the street, if that’s what we want to do. In front of the existing building, we can still put a loop in there so we can get about 30 cars in that loop.”

Williams then spoke of the sixth-through-eighth or seventh-through-eighth grade school. He stated what the company would do is build on a side of the existing auditorium and do a major grading process at the location.

Board member Faron Atwood later asked if money could be saved on grading if the process were to begin while the materials were still “on site.”

“It really depends a lot of where the garage is,” Williams responded.

“If there’s a lot of rock there, it will save you a lot more money to have the grading equipment here. If the same contractor was doing both (sites, the bus garage and the kindergarten-second grade building), you’d save some money.”

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