IWCS central office renovation resumes with new state funding

Isle of Wight County Schools is proceeding with plans to convert two remaining wings of the circa-1961 Hardy Elementary into the division’s new central office using additional state grant money.

Deputy Superintendent Christopher Coleman briefed county supervisors on the renovation at an Oct. 8 joint meeting of the supervisors and School Board.

Just under $865,000 in state school construction grant funds had been put toward the renovation as of last October, funding architectural drawings and adding warehouse doors to the old school’s gymnasium. The plans call for converting the gymnasium into a climate-controlled warehouse and converting a perpendicular wing added in the 1980s into an L-shaped, roughly 22,000-square-foot building that will bring the division’s administration, special education and technology departments back under one roof. Currently, the central office and special education departments are housed in separate modular buildings behind Westside Elementary, while the technology department occupies four classrooms at Smithfield High School.

Coleman had estimated in October 2023 that just under $1 million was needed as of that month to complete the project.

According to division spokeswoman Lynn Briggs, IWCS recently received an additional school construction grant in the amount of $2.4 million, with no local match required to accept the grant.

While the division doesn’t have an updated cost estimate for the remaining renovations, administrators are working to stay within the $2.4 million grant so that additional taxpayer dollars from the division’s 2024-25 budget don’t have to be allocated to the project, Briggs said. Nor is there an estimate as to when the work will be complete.

“The renovations are underway,” Briggs told The Smithfield Times. “Move-in dates are contingent upon the permitting process as we don’t know how long that will take.”

Coleman told the supervisors on Oct. 8 that one wing of the new central office will house instructional services, while the other will house operations. The renovations will also free up classroom space at Smithfield High by relocating the technology department.

The warehouse component of the renovation is already functional, Coleman said.

Plans to save the two wings of the old Hardy date to 2021 when site plans for the two-story replacement Hardy that opened in 2023 called for saving the gymnasium wing.

The School Board had earmarked a prior $2.3 million state school construction grant IWCS had received in 2022 as the project’s source of funding, but over $2.1 million of the 2022 grant had been spent or encumbered as of October 2023, more than half of which went to expenses unrelated to the renovation, causing the project to stall.

The division maintains that the renovation will save money in the long run by eliminating the need to build a separate warehouse, which had received bids ranging from $700,000 to $1.5 million last year, and cutting $2 million from the county’s capital improvements plan, which for many years has called for the building of a new central office near the county courthouse. The existing central office has been housed in its 11,500-square-foot modular building behind Westside since 2004.