Lauderdale County School District officials held the first of four community discussion nights on Thursday to answer voters’ questions about the upcoming Oct. 3 school bond issue.

The district is asking Lauderdale County voters who live within the county school district to approve a $12.5 million bond issue to fund the construction of a new Career and Technical Education Center located in the old Peavey building on Highway 11/80.

The CTE Center will consolidate most of the district’s career and technical education to one building, making the programs available to all students within the district. Currently, students are only able to participate in the programs offered at their campus or through Meridian’s Ross Collins Career and Technical Education Center. Some of the programs being considered for the new CTE Center will be the first of their kind in the state.

LCSD Superintendent John-Mark Cain and Career and Technical Education Director Rob Smith were on hand to explain the school district’s years-old desire to build its own CTE Center to serve county students.

“Our job is to teach children and to keep them safe, but we’ve got to teach them to where they’re going to be successful. We can’t teach for stuff that may or may not exist. They have got to have skills,” Cain told the audience.

He said not all students are going to want to go to college, and that is a good thing because there is a great need for vocational and technical jobs right now. But, he said, schools need to help students discover what career fields they are passionate about or they run the risk of losing those students.

“The main reason most students drop out of school is because they are bored,” he said.

Smith said Mississippi has one of the highest percentages in the nation of sending students to college at 80%. However, only about 30% finish with a four-year, high-level degree.

In a five-county area, including Lauderdale County, 21.5% of the jobs in that area require high-level degrees such as a bachelor’s, master’s or specialist’s degrees. With about 30% of local high school graduates actually finishing college, that leaves about 8-9% who come back home and can’t find a job and may move off as a result, he said.

About 9.6% are low skill jobs, meaning no technical training or skills are needed, but about 39.8% of available workers fall into that category, he said. Another 68.9% of jobs are middle skill work, which requires some vocational and technical training or national certification. Unfortunately, about 38% of the workforce falls into the middle school category.

“We are graduating enough students to go into the high skill area, but are we graduating enough students to go into the middle skill level? No, we are not,” Smith said. “That disparity in the gap that we are looking at between the available middle skill workers and middle skill needs is what we are trying to solve with the new CTE Center.”

Many of the residents in attendance seemed to think the vision for the CTE Center was a good idea, but several took exception with how the school district rolled out the announcement of the bond issue. They contended the little notice of a tax increase and quick special election date instead of waiting for the November general election gave the appearance of the process being “shady” and “underhanded.”

One resident wanted to know about the wording of the ballot referendum, saying it sounded as though the money could be used on other buildings and facilities. But Smith said the language in the wording comes directly from Mississippi law, and the district added the CTE Center into that wording.

“That has been a source of confusion for a lot of folks because it leads you into thinking that it can be used for other things, but this is just for the CTE project and the expansion of it,” Smith said.

When some of the CTE programs are moved to the center from their current locations at the four high schools, then those classrooms will have to be reconstructed and turned back into classrooms. There is money in the bond issue to cover those costs, he added.

Several residents wanted to know about the price tag of the new center and what happened to the $8 million appropriation from the state.

“We got a one-time appropriation from the state of $8 million … That was intended to get this project kicked off. At that point in time, when Dr. Cain and I went to the Legislature and pleaded the case for this project, there were no architects involved. There was a vision,” Smith said.

About $1.5 million of that appropriation was used to acquire the property, hire an architect, completely gut the existing building, pay for permits, remove asbestos and have design plans drawn up. When plans were finalized, the center was projected to cost between $18 million and $22 million, depending on construction and materials cost once the project gets under way, Smith said.

“That price includes equipment, it includes furniture, it includes the parking lot, it includes everything it takes to get this project finished,” he said, which would put the cost at roughly $315 per square foot for the 60,000-square-foot building.

The district took the middle road and accepted the projected cost of $19 million. Subtracting the $6.5 million in the bank, is how the district arrived at a bond issue for $12.5 million, he said.

Attended Devra Massey, who has children at West Lauderdale, said she supports the bond issue.

“I currently have two high school students enrolled at Ross Collins, and I hate they are going to miss out on this opportunity,” she said, noting one would have been interested in the new aviation technology program.

Coming from a long line of blue collar workers, Massey said career and technical classes help students, who have no interest in going to college, discover a career field that interests them.

“It creates a purpose for some of the ones who get left behind with academics or the ones where the opportunities for college are not there or are not pushed,” she said. “It also gives them a chance to figure out what they don’t want to do.”

The only downfall with her children going to Ross Collins, she said, has been that the two school systems are not always on the same schedule. For example, Lauderdale County started a couple of days before the Meridian school district this year, and state testing days are sometimes not at the same time.

“The schedules do not always match up at Ross Collins but with the new CTE Center being a Lauderdale County school, then the schedules will match up, she said.

Tommy Gunn and his wife, Sarita Gunn, said they thought the CTE Center was much needed in the county school district. They were just concerned about the process of how the bond issue was announced.

“I am seeing and hearing, just like we were here tonight, the concept and the need is there. But the way it has been presented to the public and to vote on it, that is what mainly people are having issues with,” Sarita Gunn said. “It’s not that they don’t think the project is worthwhile. It is the way they are approaching us to vote on it that people are not happy about.”

The Gunns said they had not heard about the bond issue until about three weeks ago even though they have been aware of efforts to build a CTE Center for years.

“I knew they had the $8 million. I was not told and made knowledgeable until three weeks ago that we needed $12.5 million more,” Sarita Gunn said. “Nobody knew that until right now, and we are holding this election in less than a month.”

Resident Jeremy Collins said he is still praying about how to vote on the project.

“It is a wonderful project. The vision is just amazing,” he said. “It’s the first of its kind based on the way they were talking, and my research has shown that to be true.”

However, little information about the project until the last few weeks has given him pause.

‘It just seems there may have been something not as upfront as we would expect,” Collins said. “But I know these people … and I trust them, and that’s what I have to do is trust these people I have elected to put things in place. So this is me coming tonight to do my due diligence.”

He said he is undecided on how he will vote.

Cain said he understood people are not happy with how the district went about announcing the center and the bond issue. But, he said, he hoped that would not keep them supporting what is in the best needs of Lauderdale County’s students.

“What it really comes down to is whether you think this is valuable for the future of Meridian and Lauderdale County. It’s really that cut and dry,” he said. “Communities have to survive and the question is, ‘Is this going to help our community survive?’”

Community meetings will also be held at Southeast Middle School Auditorium on Monday night, Clarkdale High School gym on Sept. 26 and West Lauderdale Elementary gym on Sept. 28. All of the meetings will begin at 6 p.m. and are open to the public.