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Schools

School Sewer Project to Start Soon

The sewer project and the new Dean Rusk Middle School will be funded through the recently approved Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax.

Two projects in the Holly Springs-Hickory Flat area will be funded with the Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax approved by voters on Thursday, and the said work on one of those projects will begin immediately.

While an immediate start date for work that will bring sewer service to the three schools in the area— and —was not immediately available, Superintendent Frank Petruzielo said that construction will begin in the “very near future”.

“In terms of the specific time when you can start seeing the contractors out there digging the trenches, I don’t have that information yet,” Petruzielo said.

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 Lines will be brought in from two directions to the area of Sequoyah High for project, which also includes replacing the drainage fields.

“It will not interrupt teaching or learing that is going on in those three schools, but it will position us to begin the Dean Rusk replacement building sometime after we begin the Teasley Middle replacement,” the superintendent said.

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The time frame for completion was not immediately available, but Petruzielo said it would be the topic of a cabinet meeting scheduled for Friday morning.

The new Dean Rusk Middle School is slated to open in Fall 2015 and, while it will be a carbon copy of the new Booth and Teasley Middle Schools, plans will have to be altered to fit Dean Rusk’s smaller, more limited campus.

“There will have to be tweaks to that prototypical plan,” Petruzielo said.

Architects are expected to begin work designing the school “very soon”.

“Before passage of the SPLOST renewal, it would have been unrealistic to do that work and have to pay them for it if we were not sure (we were going to be able to go ahead with it),” Petruzielo said.

The new building will have enough room for Dean Rusk’s sixth-graders to move from Holly Springs, and elementaries and join the seventh-and-eighth-graders at the middle school.

Cherokee County The new SPLOST begins next year and runs through 2017.

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