New Clarkdale head football coach Will Vollor

Renovations to Clarkdale High School’s softball field are on schedule with plans still set for the Lady Bulldogs to be playing on the new field by February, members of Lauderdale County School District’s Board of Education were told during their monthly meeting on Thursday.

“They poured concrete today for setting the steel stairs for the concession stand. Tomorrow they’ll start setting the steel for the canopies for the grandstands, which that cuts us loose to get the bricklayer back in there to start laying the backstop wall and the columns for the foul line fence next week,” said architect Arjen Lagendijk, during his monthly update to the school board on several projects underway at Clarkdale.

He said the brick for the softball project arrived either last Friday or earlier this week and most of the supplies needed for the project are now on hand. Sheetrock should begin going up inside the concession stand soon, he said.

“If you’ve driven by, you can tell it is starting to take shape,” he said.

Lagendijk said the district also has requested the contractor to provide pricing for adding the on-deck circles at each of the dugouts along with the netting around that, along with the cost of adding back a barrier fence between the campus and an adjacent neighbor.

“In addition, we are looking at a little bit of a site change behind each of the dugouts to help us with a little bit of drainage,” he said.

In spring 2022, two separate tornadoes swept through the Clarkdale area within weeks of each other, heavily damaging the school’s softball field and several buildings on campus, including Building 300.

Having to find softball fields to play on the last two years, Clarkdale parents have expressed a desire over the last several months to have the new field completed in time for the spring season.

Lagendijk assured board members the contractor has been made aware that “whatever happens, we have got to be playing on this field in February, and we are going to be playing on it in February.”

In good news received on Thursday, Mississippi Power has agreed to move a lone utility pole on the softball field side of Clarkdale Road, located less than five feet from the roadside, to the other side of Clarkdale Road at no cost to the district, Lagendijk said.

“The softball field right now is being served off a pole that is on the softball field side, and it is sitting there all by its lonesome. We had asked Mississippi Power what it would take to get rid of that pole,” he said.

Not only would removing the pole make the area look nicer, but it also would be safer with the new pole located about 20 feet off the roadside on the other side of Clarkdale Road. The electrical lines serving the softball field would run underground from the new pole.

“Mississippi Power came through and is going to fix that,” he said.

Building 300

In an update of Building 300, which took the heaviest damage from the tornadoes, demolition of the interior is basically finished about a week ahead of schedule. Building 300 is used as an elementary building with those students now relocated to modular trailers on campus.

“Building 300, if anybody has walked through it, it’s empty,” Lagendijk said. “There is not much left except for the walls. The demolition is basically finished.”

He said construction fencing is scheduled to be installed next Wednesday, a day after students, faculty and staff leave to go on Christmas break.

“It will probably be trucked in Tuesday afternoon, and they will start installation on Wednesday,” Lagendijk said. “They are prepping some of the stuff on the inside (of the building) for the steel when it shows up. The biggest thing we are waiting on at this very moment is the steel decking.”

The decking is expected to arrive in early January. Once the decking arrives, work on the roof will begin in quarter sections with the roofing project expected to be completed some time in February. Then, work will begin on the interior of the building.

Building 300 should be completed some time in May, probably not before the end of the current school year, but in plenty of time before the start of the next school year, Lagendijk said.

“I wish I could tell you that ‘yeah, before school is over, they are in it.’ No, but they are definitely in it in the fall without any trouble,” he said.

New head football coach

In other business at Thursday’s meeting, the school board approved Will Vollor as the new head football coach at Clarkdale High School. Vollor currently serves as an assistant football coach at Clarkdale, as well as the girls soccer coach. He replaces Marlon Brannan, who is leaving as head coach to become the superintendent of the Enterprise School District.

Also on Thursday, the district’s business manager Tracy Luke told board members that ad valorem tax collections dipped in November from $753,000 to $292,000.

“It’s that time of year when ad valorem has dropped off, and we are hoping that when we get our November payment in December that it will be up. We usually start seeing a little bit of an increase in ad valorem in December; it just depends on whether people go and pay their taxes a little early,” she said.

Overall, the district’s cash balances looked good, she said, and the school board approved the district’s cash flow statement, reconciled bank statement, consolidated balance sheet and budget status report.

Roofing projects

Also at the meeting, Lagendijk told the school board that re-roofing projects the district is looking into at Northeast elementary and high schools, Southeast elementary and high schools, and West Lauderdale middle and high schools could cost as much as $2 million.

“In total for what you are wanting to do, you are looking at between 75,000 and 80,000 square feet of roof. There are a couple of them that are high need. The first one that comes to mind is Building 100 at Northeast Elementary School,” he said.

These projects would require the roofs to be removed and the decking under those roofs to be replaced because in many of the cases the decking is so old it is rotten.

“We can’t do that without taking the roof off .… It is going to be a replacement. You cannot just skim over it and hope that it works for the next few years,” he said of the decking. “You’ve got to replace it.”

Lagendijk suggested preparing the roofing projects in packages for bidding so the district will have options on which projects to tackle first in hopes of stretching “your dollars as far as we can and then we make the hard decisions of which buildings get it this go around.”

The roofing projects would need to be done during the summer when students are out of school.