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Cost to be $572,947

Coffee County Central High School will soon see the installation of a modern fire alarm system to replace the aging and faulty system dating from the mid-1970s.

Board members voted 7-1 during its regular meeting Monday, Aug. 12 to approve a contract with Warren Mechanical for $572,947 for the installation of the new fire alarm system at the high school.

“We have a fire alarm that is malfunctioning on us, I should say it is limp mode,” Deputy Director of Schools Kelvin Shores said during the meeting. “We are making it through but it is not up to par where it needs to be.”

Shores said the district is receiving after-hours phone calls on a regular basis from the Manchester Fire Department informing them the fire alarm has gone off.

“We brought the last person in to work on it and they are saying it is done, it has been fixed all it can be fixed, it is done,” he said. “That is when we started looking at the process.”

Board Member Freda K. Jones asked if the money would come from the district’s fund balance.

“It is not currently in the budget because we did not have the information to put it in the budget at the time we did the budget back in April,” district Business Manager April Melson said. “Then the budget got delayed at the County Commission. In order to pay for the fire alarm there is not $572,000 in the capital outlay line and so I have to remove some funds from fund balance and put in the capital outlay line for us to pay for that fire alarm.”

Board members also approved the required budget amendment during the meeting.

Student Ambassador Ella Helms said during the meeting that during a recent fire drill at the high school certain classrooms were not able to hear the fire alarm.

“I have been there for three years, we all know what it sounds like,” she said. “In some hallways it is a buzz, some hallways it is more of an alarm.”

Helms said her class, located in the building’s Foreign Language Department, had to be informed that the fire alarm was sounding for the fire drill.

“Luckily it was just a drill, but if there had been a fire, we did not hear the fire alarm at all,” she said.

CCCHS Principal Paul Parsley said during the meeting that the school is required by state law to have two fire drills within the first 30 days of the school-year, the first of which was held Thursday, Aug. 10.

“…Teachers had gone through instructions for what we do with a fire drill…and when we conducted our drill the alarm sounded in some parts of the building and not in others,” he said.

Parsley said school administrators then went around the building to determine what rooms the alarm was not sounding in.

“That is why we practiced the drill,” Parsley said. “You drill not only to teach kids but also to identify problems and we certainly did that last Thursday.”

Board member Freda K. Jones asked Tim Little of OLG Engineering how long it would take for a new fire alarm system to be installed at the high school.

Little said the district is looking at a timeline of about one year for the new system.

“We will start getting wiring installed,” he said. “The other system will stay as fully functional as it can until everything is installed, tested and certified as the new system. Then you start taking out the old.”

Board member Thomas Ballard asked why the district received only one bid for the project.

“There are numbers of possibilities with it,” Little said. “The interest was there, I think we had four systems there…they were represented and decided not to.”

Director of Schools Dr. Charles Lawson said approving the contract with the McMinnville based Warren Mechanical comes with his recommendation.

“Considering that right now we have a faulty system that is not operating properly my recommendation is that we accept this bid,” he said.