Architect Craig Buckley and his firm, James W. Buckley & Associates, have been working with staff at the existing Southeast Bulloch High School and Bulloch County Schools central office to tighten the floorplan of the proposed new SEB High in an effort to trim potential costs.

For now, it's being planned as a 2,000-student school, which probably won't be completed at that size until 2029 or 2030, when it would open for the first time. That would be a first phase, expandable in the future.

The earlier concept, announced last year, was for a 2,500-student high school, expandable to 3,000 students. Superintendent Charles Wilson acknowledged last fall that it would be not only the school system's largest facility ever, but by far its most expensive. In a time of soaring construction costs, the estimated price tag for the two-story, originally 422,000-square-foot building climbed from an earlier $112.5 million rough estimate to $135 million by March of this year.

Meanwhile, expected funding lagged in the $95 million to $125 million range. This includes the current five-year run of the 1% Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, or E-SPLOST, capped at $110 million but with only $80 million borrowable in advance through a bond issue under terms of the November 2022 referendum, plus a projected $15 million in state funding for school construction the county system has earned.

So Board of Education members have been seeking cost-cutting steps. While the architect reported Sept. 12 on efforts to shorten hallways and rearranged the partially pinwheel-shaped building for greater efficiency, the school superintendent reminded the board that one important reduction had already been made.

"Just to reiterate for everyone, this school is not being built for 3,000 students right now," Wilson said. "With those 111 classrooms, it's being designed for roughly 2,000 students, with the potential to expand to 3,000 students, if needed — if and when needed."

Shared spaces

But commons areas, such as the cafeteria, auditorium and arena or gymnasium need to be designed for the future, potential capacity, he said.

Buckley agreed that it is hard to expand areas such as the cafeteria and kitchen, saying, "I think it's wise to do it this way, day one."

Wilson commented that Bulloch County "has kind of a sad history" of planning cafeterias too small and, as a result, having students rotate into and out of their lunchbreaks from 10 a.m. until almost 2 p.m. at some schools.

Shorter halls

But the floorplan changes made thus far that Buckley reported mainly affect the length of hallways and the size of a courtyard, without reducing seating in the cafeteria.

The front courtyard, which Buckley said was originally drawn nearly as long as a football field on one side — in other words, about 300 feet long — was reduced to 140 feet by 140 feet. In the earlier drawing it was along a hallway about 660 feet long, "which is awfully big, like, too big," he said, but has been brought down closer to 400 feet.

"So it's still a big area, but it's getting compressed, which of course is saving square footage, which we're trying to do," he said.

These reductions were made possible in part by repositioning the arena and gymnasium area, which previously was shown as a large rectangle intersecting the back of that long front wing at a straight-on 90-degree angle, so that it now intersects at about 45 degrees. This is the first time Buckley has attached an arena to a school this way, but it does make the design "a little bit more true to the pinwheel" layout of the classroom wings, besides reducing the required hallway length, he said.

In one earlier vision for the arena, 6,000 seats were mentioned. As now planned, the arena will have 2,200 stadium-style seats. The school plan also includes a 1,200-seat auditorium and a 250-seat smaller theater, and those haven't changed.

Along hallways behind the arena, weightrooms, coaches' classrooms and locker rooms are positioned toward the planned football, softball and baseball fields and track, eliminating the need for a separate fieldhouse, he said.

The Career, Technical and Agricultural Education, or CTAE, wing, which was shown attached in perpendicular "dogleg" fashion to the end of a regular classroom wing in the earlier plan has been replaced by a shorter, wider attachment closer in. This portion of the complex will include heavy, covered "shop" labs, such as for industrial maintenance and automotive programs, and a separate driveway area for parents to drop off children at the high school-operated prekindergarten.

"The sizes of the wings have all been reduced. …," Buckley said. "This is all going to be about making sure we're getting our building as small as possible to be the most cost-efficient building for the first phase."

But in site-plan drawings he displayed, the revised first-phase footprint of the building was shown in red, with a white extension beyond the end of each classroom wing.

"What you see here in white, that is still the future expansions where the building can go, but prior to that, we didn't actually have as much room here, and that is actually a much improved site plan," he said.

Future extensions could expand the building from 111 "instructional units," or standard classrooms, to 150 or more, Buckley said.

Now he is working with Principal Dr. Julie Mizell and faculty members at the current Southeast Bulloch High on details of the plan for the new school, and his firm will need to begin addressing details of interest to fire marshals, such as the size of stairwells.

"We have a timeline that we're working off of that we're pretty close to," Buckley told the board. "So ... we're trying to get the pricing drawings next summer so that we could bid the whole thing. We could actually start site work early, but I think the decision was, let's just do it all at once, get all the numbers together."

He agreed with Wilson that about four more years would be needed to complete the school. Although in some sense a replacement, it will be an additional school, with the current SEB High becoming SEB Middle and the current SEB Middle a new entity, Southeast Bulloch Upper Elementary School.

So exactly when the new high school could open and the other transitions take place will depend on when in 2029 the building is completed, Wilson said.

Brooklet sewer?

Another ongoing issue in the planning is whether the new high school — as well as the three existing schools at Brooklet — will be connected to Brooklet's planned city sewer system. In Buckley's earlier site plan, two areas of the new campus, one at the east end and one at the west end, were designated for drain fields, in case the school needs its own septic tank system.

A board member asked how many acres would be taken up by drain fields, and Buckley deferred to Wilson, who said he had been talking to one of Buckley's engineers.

"The estimate is somewhere between — and again, you don't know until you get in there and actually find out — but the estimate is somewhere between 15 and 30 acres," Wilson said.

Discussion is reportedly continuing between Bulloch County Schools and Brooklet city officials for the school system to become a major Brooklet sewer customer and save that much space for other purposes on the 89-acre new SEBHS site.