Parents of Holly Springs Elementary School students likely will have only another month to battle with school buses while dropping of and picking up their children.

The Cherokee County Board of Education voted on Thursday night to approve W.E. Contracting Company, Inc., to construct a parent drive at the schoo at a cost of $558,216. That will alleviate traffic congestion and make the area safer, board member Robert Usher said.

"It becomes a traffic jam," Usher said of the school's current drive. "(This) school only has one entrance and exit. There's one road in, and there's one road out. We need a way to divert the traffic to another direction."

Holly Springs is one of three schools in the county that don't have separate parent drives. The others are Boston and Carmel elementary schools. The new drive at Holly Springs Elementary is slated to be finished before the end of 2012.

Parent drives at the other two schools are included in the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax that was approved last year, but district spokeswoman Barbara Jacoby said that the money for those projects already has been bonded from remaining 2006 SPLOST funds and revenues anticipated through the 2011 SPLOST.