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At a joint meeting last week, the Rockbridge County School Board presented their updated capital improvements plan to the Board of Supervisors.
The plan details the major projects to the schools’ property from fiscal years 2024 to 2030.
This year’s updates include plans to replace the fire panels in most of the county’s schools in the next fiscal year, which is expected to cost $150,000.
“The fire panels at Fairfield Elementary School, Natural Bridge Elementary School, Mountain View Elementary, Effinger Central Office, and Rockbridge County High School all need to be updated,” according to the capital improvements plan.
“Many rely on landline telephone lines for connectivity and monitoring, which has proven to be unreliable. The most reliable systems are those that use a WIFI connection. Currently, only the fire panel at Maury River Middle School uses a WIFI connection.”
Ongoing renovations to the Rockbridge Innovation Center, formerly the Floyd S. Kay Vocational Center, are currently taking up much of the schools’ capital budget, but the Board is looking ahead to renovations on the main high school building.
The cost of the Innovation Center project led the Board to increase the estimated budget.
“With respect to the high school renovations, I think last year we had $18 million in there for high school proper renovations,” Phillip Thompson, district superintendent, told the supervisors.
“We bumped it up to 25, basically because we just did the Innovation Center for $14 million, we recognize that $18 million, probably $25 million, isn’t enough to renovate the high school proper.”
Thompson believes a study on the high school would help the district budget for it.
“We also recognize that here in the near future, we need to do another study, one on the high school itself. We did one division-wide study, it’s probably been seven or eight years ago, but we’ll probably need to do one on the high school itself so we get a better dollar figure for what we’re talking about.”
Other additions to the capital improvements plan are resurfacing the track at Maury River Middle School, which is expected to cost $85,000 in fiscal year 2030, and resealing and relining the parking lots at all county school buildings, for which the board is budgeting $125,020 in fiscal year 2030.
