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The Hamblen County Board of Education will hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the New Lincoln Heights Elementary School on Monday, June 12.

The ceremony will begin at 10 a.m. at Gateway Service Park off Martin Luther King Boulevard in Morristown.

The new school is a highly anticipated project for the school district. It has been working since 2021 to get it up and running.

Previous superintendent Jeff Perry was the first to make the case to the Hamblen County Commission Education Committee on June 14, 2021.

The current school is facing outdated open classrooms and overcrowding due to the growing community, the new school was a must.

The commission approved a proposal to move $0.09 in property tax revenue to the county debt service fund which will allow it to fund the new school without raising taxes or fees in the county.

After securing funding and support from the committee, the school board moved forward to find a new location for the facility.

In August of 2021 the school board presented a plan to the commission to construct the new school near the Morristown Utilities facility on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway near State Highway 160.

The board explained that a school can be built in 18 months, but with materials on a short supply, it allowed for the construction to take two years to complete with students in the building by 2024.

The old elementary school would be used for overflow from the middle school and also as a staging area so if the district had construction work at Meadowview it would have a place to put students without having to get the mobile units.

The school board requested permission to build the school and $22 million from the county to cover most of the $26.7 million cost of the school, with the remainder of the cost being covered by ESSER 3.0 funds.

The commission voted unanimously to approve the resolution authorizing the construction of a new school building and for the county to spend $22 million for the project.

In October of 2021 the school board voted unanimously (with member Clyde Kinder being absent) to purchase the 33-acre site located in the Gateway Service Area for the new elementary school, totaling $1.5 million.

A few months later, at its February 2022 meeting, the school board unveiled plans for a new Lincoln Heights Elementary School.

The plan included space to house at least 600 students, with a possibility of 800 to 850 students should extra classrooms be built.

The gym and cafeteria areas are put together so that the cafeteria may be used as overflow for the gym. The building plans include room for additional classrooms and will be bid as an alternate.

The artist’s renderings that were presented included an entry road and another exit road from the school from Martin Luther King Drive.

Bus traffic will come in off Route 160, but will not go back on the highway. A road expansion from the Regional Service Park will allow exiting traffic to go back towards Sulphur Springs Road, which has been cleared for bus traffic.

The board determined to present the bid as one package and the site work will be bid in another package.

As current Superintendent Arnie Bunch took the helm, he continued to spearhead the project.

At the commission’s March committee meeting the county’s Superintendent for Administration Hugh Clement came before the finance committee to give an update on the Lincoln Heights Elementary project.

Clement announced that Merit Construction had won the bid to construct the new school and they anticipated to have students in the school by August 2024.

He explained that the school will be a 700 student building; the current elementary school is at 500 students, so there would be room for growth.

Traci Antrican, the Hamblen County Department of Education Business Supervisor, discussed the budget for the school and what has changed.

She explained that the county had a total working budget of $27.4 million and the bid from Merit construction was the lowest bid at $26.3 million which with our budget would have left the county with $1 million dollars to work with.

However, the school district had spent $4.1 million from the ESSER grant to pay for land acquisition, site preparations, architectural fees, traffic studies and with the inclusion of $1 million to purchase furniture and technology for the school that left it at a $4.1 million deficit.

The board of education and the State of Tennessee approved an amendment to our ESSER 3 application to move the $5 million the county had earmarked for Lincoln Middle’s HVAC program to the Lincoln Elementary project.

With the $5 million for the project the district will have $900,000 reserved, to be used for the access road onto MLK Parkway.