The Meridian Public School District board approved two separate change orders to projects ongoing at George Washington Carver Elementary School and Ross Collins Career and Technical Education Center, raising their total costs, during a regular monthly meeting on Wednesday.

A change order on work to replace a cooling tower at Carver Elementary will expend the remaining contingency funds in the ESSER-funded project and will increase the overall project cost to $421,171, said Clay Sims, the district’s director of operations.

The change order was needed because there were some issues with the cooling tower, which was moved from the Meridian High School campus where it was no longer in use, Sims said. The cooling tower was reused to save money and expedite the project, but there were parts on the tower that needed to be replaced.

“Even with the parts that must be replaced, it is still a large time and cost savings to reuse this tower,” he said.

In a separate project, work to re-roof Ross Collins, also an ESSER-funded project, has encountered another snag. When the project originally got underway last year, wet insulation due to leaks was discovered under the CTE center’s roof. The board voted to halt the project, close out the work that had already been done, then re-bid the project with the additional work needed to replace the extensive insulation damage.

Independent Roofing Systems was awarded the low bid of $559,400 to complete the Ross Collins roofing project.

Sims said there was some confusion during the planning process between the original contract for roofing that was not able to be completed due to the unforeseen circumstances and the work that was rebid. Inadvertently, a roof section was overlooked during this process and not included in the construction documents that each contractor bid on for the rebid.

In order to ensure the roof is completed in totality with this project, he said, then this overlooked section needed to be added. Adding the section will raise the project cost by $88,424 to a total cost of $647,824.

Both the Carver and Ross Collins projects are being funded through ESSER, or the Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief Fund, which is the portion of three pandemic relief laws that allocated about $190 billion in aid to states and school districts nationwide. The funding aimed at making schools safer for in-person learning and addressed educational issues that resulted from the pandemic.

Also during Wednesday’s meeting, the MPSD school board through its consent agenda action:

— Approved a dual credit program agreement between Meridian Community College and the Meridian Public School District that will allow high school students to earn college and CTE credits toward a postsecondary degree or certificate at MCC that will count toward a high school diploma.

— Approved the purchase of four new 2025 school buses during the 2024-2025 school year, including one 71-passenger Thomas Built bus at a cost of $128,882, one 71-passenger International bus at a cost of $127,000, and two 77-passenger International buses at a cost of $127,000 each for a total cost to the district of $509,882.

— Approved the recommendation to purchase a 2024 Chevrolet Tahoe PPV from Cannon Motors of Mississippi for use by the Campus Police Department at a cost of $51,876 to be funded by an MCOPS grant.

— Approved an agreement with Happy Smiles to provide basic dental exams and with Primary Eyecare to provide eye exams at no-cost to students identified as homeless and at a discounted cost to the district with funding for the services coming through ARP ESSER Homeless funding.