Hobbton Highwish list begins

Just over a month after the Sampson County Board of Education got word the school system had been awarded $62 million in state funding to build a new Hobbton High School, construction is in the planning phase.

Sampson County Schools Superintendent Dr. Jamie King said progress was being made but practically all that progress was within the confines of paper pushing, a realistic first step once funds were secured.

“Currently, we’re kind of in that process where lawyers are reviewing contracts, reviewing the information that’s been submitted in the grant, just to kind of make sure that everything has been submitted according to proper practices and rules,” King said last week.

“From there, the district, we’re trying to create our steering committee, which will be, internal staff, external staff and some community members who will help kind of guide the process,” King added. “Continuing from there, myself and the Board of Education will visit some schools to look at what are new and different features in new school construction these days. Myself and a board member are actually going to go to a school construction conference to look at some new builds to get a feel for those new trends in school construction.”

Next steps, the superintendent said, would be to compile a “wish list” of desired features for the school. During the grant process, school officials had to trim some of those desires to up their chances of garnering the grant funds, which meant giving up plans to construct an auditorium and greenhouses on the new school site. Instead the existing auditorium and greenhouses will have toe used.

“What we will do next is we’ll kind of have our wish list saying here’s what we want in the school,” he said. “That will be based on what we’ve seen, what we like and things we’d maybe want to have, if possible, but we may not be able to get. We talk pretty regularly about that. The idea I use for that is saying, you can have anything you want in the school, but you can’t have everything that you want, right? So, if you could pick just one thing that you want what would it be, then we’ll go from there.”

The process of determining wants and needs, King said, will boil down to posing the question to get feedback, something he said he wants from his staff. the steering committee and the Hobbton community.

“I’ll be talking with the board, with the community, with teachers at the school, and we’ll kind of have these exercises to have people say, ‘oh, I like this, I don’t like that or I think we need to add this,’” King said. “There’ll be this, what I call a listening and learning tour, that will really give us that initial information and lets us listen to feedback.

“From there, we’ll take all that feedback, and provide it to the engineers and designers and they’ll kind of try to see what they can incorporate. After that, we’ll have a finalized floor plan and then, once we get the finalized floor plan, we’ll put that out for bid with a contractor, select a contractor, and then start building the school.

“All of that is probably a 12-month process before you get a finalized floor plan … that’s what you’re looking at with all those steps,” King explained.

Among the items on the wish list will be one King is adamant needs to be considered and incorporated — space built for the future.

“I think for me, it’s really about having instructional spaces that can be used in the future,” he reiterated “And so, I think that when we build schools, I think it’s easy for us to think about what is needed today in the classroom. But, what we should be asking ourselves is what is going to be needed in that classroom in 20 years? We want to make sure that our building is just as easily used 20 years from now as it will be when it opens. I think that, for me, that’s my focus, is making sure that we’re thinking of the future, not just thinking of now.”

It’s the potential for those ideas and the partnerships that could form with the community during the planning process that King said is the best part of the construction process.

“I think it’s more about, if we have thoughts and ideas, who do we share those with, right?” he said. “As I told people, I don’t know that there’s any bad ideas per se. Well, let’s be really clear, there are definitely some bad ideas. But for the most part, this is that fun time where we can think and dream about building the school.

“A big part of that is asking if we have talked to the community, have we talked to Newton Grove, have we talked to those in Keener,” King said, “and have we talked to local entities to see what they’re thinking and planning for the future. An example that I’ve used is, let’s say Newton Grove was going to build a new public library. Well, it would be really smart to build that new public library with a new high school and integrate it into one system.

“I don’t know that Newton Grove is about to doing something like that, but we need to make sure we’re having those conversations with the communities, to make sure that we’re not missing opportunities for collaboration.”

While King said there is plenty of excitement about the projects and many ideas, right now it was more a waiting game than anything else.

“There’s definitely no other news to report or announcements,” King said. “Now, it’s just kind of a lot of waiting on next steps. We’re not there yet as there’s still a lot we’ve got to do to get this done. We’ve got to wait for the lawyers to approve some things as well. So right now, it’s a lot of waiting before we can start to work on some floor plans for people to review.”