The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

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August 7, 2010

New Marsh Fork school closer to reality

By Andrea Lannom Register-Herald Reporter

A site purchase is one step closer for the new Marsh Fork Elementary School as the Raleigh County Board of Education is now looking for an archeological survey for the Cantley site in Rock Creek.

The Cantley site is about 3.5 miles away from the old elementary school building and Rick Snuffer, president of the Raleigh County Board of Education, says the reason it was chosen is because of the easy access off the highway.

“With the other sites, we were looking at building roads, so you can’t beat the location,” he said. “This will be some major savings because you run into a lot of money when you’re looking into building roads.”

A purchase is in negotiations. Snuffer says the board wanted to do the core drillings before making a final decision.

“We need to look for a few things like checking if it’s the original soil, checking for caverns and also looking into the history to see if it’s historically significant,” he said.

“We want it to be a good foundation for the school.”

If there are problems with this site, Snuffer says they will look into the other one which is equally as close. If everything checks out, he says they will make the purchase.

Currently, Snuffer says architects are working on the design of the school. These architects will meet with staff and educators to plan the number of teachers and students to be in the building.

The board is also looking for Marsh Fork Elementary to be a Lead Certified School, which means they will look for ways to make it more environmentally conscious.

“We might look into drilling thermal wells, putting in solar panels, having runoff water collected for energy, things like that,” he said. “We don’t know what we can incorporate at this point.”

For right now, Snuffer says they will start on the project as soon as a contract is awarded for the survey. Snuffer assured that the project is running according to plan, however. 

“We are still working to get done and break ground by next summer,” he said. “We are on task and we haven’t run into any major roadblocks right now.”

— E-mail: alannom@register-herald.com

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