The Lauderdale County School District is moving ahead with its plans for a consolidated Career and Technical Education Center with the school board approving a scaled down proposal for the facility during its regular meeting Thursday.

In a vote of 5-0, the school board approved a recommendation for MP Design Group, based in Biloxi, to modify its contract and redesign its original plans for the center at a cost of $171,500 to get it within the district’s budget.

“As you know, we had one idea and that idea didn’t come to fruition, so we said we are going back to the drawing board and go back to another idea. So, this is 2.0,” Superintendent John-Mark Cain told board members.

Last October, voters in the Lauderdale County School District overwhelmingly defeated a $12.5 million bond issue to help fund the new consolidated CTE Center, projected to cost about $19 million. Along with the bond money, the district planned to use money remaining from an $8 million appropriation from the state Legislature for the project.

But with the defeat of the bond issue, the district had to return to the drawing board.

Plans still call for constructing the CTE Center in the old Peavey building on Highway 11/80. But, the design plans for the building are greatly scaled back.

We’ve had to greatly reduce it to bring it down into the available budget now. The existing building is going to pretty much look the same. There will be very little variation of kind of what you see now,” said David Machado of MP Design Group.

In the original plans, the back warehouse space was going to house eight to 10 sections, or rooms, to serve all of the different CTE programs.

“The approach we have now, we’re basically only cutting that entire space into four large pieces. If you kind of think about it like a piece of a pie, we are not cutting that pie as much, which allows us to be more cost effective,” he said. “And we are greatly simplifying a lot of things, like the flooring and the other finishes that go into a building, the millwork. We have taken out the full service kitchen that was in there that would serve the banquet area. It has been a painstaking process to get this thing down as much as possible.”

School board president Kelvin Jackson said he would like to see “no frills” in the new design.

“There is limited funding, and based on that limited funding … I would like to see no frills and what I mean by that, I would love for those dollars that we currently have to go towards functional square footage,” Jackson said. “Functional square footage from the standpoint of providing our kids the CTE courses needed in order for them to be able to succeed.

“Pretty things look nice, but pretty things are not going to allow our kids the opportunity to learn what they need to learn to be prepared, to be able to compete in the world in which we live,” he said.

Machado assured Jackson there will be “no frills” in the new design.

“No, there are no frills,” he said.

Cain concurred, saying “We have taken it down to the bare minimum.”

Machado said there will be several projects, particularly to the front exterior of the building, that will be bid as alternate projects in case funding becomes available.

Originally, plans called for housing 13 different CTE programs at the new center. Some of them were current programs, and some would be new programs.

But, now plans call for four programs to be in the center when it opens.

“Think of it like a mall, you have anchor programs, or anchor stores, at the mall. We are going to have anchor programs,” said Rob Smith, the district’s career and technical education director. “That’s one way that we had to cut a whole lot of our costs is to use programs that we currently already have that we were only offering at certain schools.

“So instead of 13 programs like we were originally thinking, really we are only going to start with four,” he said. “But those programs are programs that we already have teachers for, we already have, depending on the program, probably 80% of the equipment already in the program. We are going to need a little bit of equipment to polish it off and make it accessible to all of the students in the district.”

The four programs that will start up at the new CTE Center will be ag power, an educator preparation program, law and public safety, and business, marketing and finance.

“I feel like what we need to do is we need to get in the building, we need to get things rolling, we need to get programs going, we need to get our transportation ironed out,” Smith said. “At that point, we can look at what we need for extra and more programs.”

Machado said he hopes to have the redesign completed for the district to bid the project by mid May. Smith said he doesn’t expect the new CTE Center to be ready for students until the start of the 2026-2027 school year.