The Paulding County School Board met for their bi-weekly meeting last week to discuss additions to schools, repairs to facilities resulting from the mid-September flood, and other administrative presentations.

The main segment of the day’s meeting centered on the school facility updates from Marty Turner, executive director of maintenance and facilities. He presented reports and photographs of the progress of additions to East Paulding High School to include a new turning lane, additional parking, a new building corridor and an access road for emergency vehicles. Their expected completion date is Dec. 1, 2009. Hiram High School has an addition on the way, including a fence installed on top of their retainer wall. Herschel Jones Middle School is installing a new flag pole and plans for additional parking. Paulding County High School has foundation areas under construction. The new W.C. Abney Elementary School is still on schedule with construction and it is slated to open in fall of 2010.

There are reimbursements from the Department of Education for Sara Ragsdale Elementary School, Carl Scoggins Middle School, and Hal Hutchens Elementary School up to a total estimated $19 million.

Additional items included potential installation of cell phone towers on school premises.

The cell towers would be provided by the cellular provider T-Mobile. The towers would be designed with the school logo.

Superintendent Larry Ragsdale and board member Therese Phillips expressed concern and discussed a few benefits and detriments of this venture.

In the end, the board decided to table the discussion and seek public input in addition to conducting further research into the subject.

The remainder of the meeting concerned presenting the Teacher of the Year, Leon Grant, a Hyundai from Cartersville Hyundai to be used during his reigning year.

In addition, McClure Middle School won a mass canned food drive prize of $1,000. There were 6,000 cans contributed in the contest. The future contests will involve all of the elementary schools during the week of Nov. 16 to Nov. 20, and later the high schools from Jan. 25 to Jan. 29.

The school board approved retaining their current security monitoring service, award contract to a septic service, and purchase and install whiteboards to replace existing chalkboards.