Bids were awarded Tuesday night for the demolition of the old Grady Street School.
The county commission approved the low bid from SEC Sitework of Bristol in the amount of $69,200 at their regular meeting last Tuesday night. The meeting was delayed a week due to Hurricane “Debby”.
A total of 13 bids were received for the demolition.
Other bidders included Southern Environmental Services of Marietta, at $89,300, Elev8 of Jacksonville, FL, at $117,000, Complete Demolition Services of Carrollton at $121,000, Imperial Construction Company of Douglas at $126,500, Trinity Industrial Services of Atlanta at $129,715, Piedmont Reconstruction Company, Inc, of Augusta at $129,800, American Logistics of Griffin at $137,497, Thrift Land Clearing LLC of Pavo at $199,725, Innovative Land Solutions of Blackshear at $235,000, W&B Real Estate and Construction of Blackshear at $240,000 and SGLC Consulting of Atlanta at $273,571.
The board also awarded the bid for asbestos removal at the old school. Southern Asbestos Abatement Company of Statesboro was the sole bidder in the amount of $59,755.
The county commission voted in May to begin the process of taking bids to tear down the remainder of the facility.
The old school has been deteriorating and has become dilapidated and overgrown with brush along the front in recent years. The facility is no longer being used by the county.
The county’s Head Start program operated in the old campus until 2007 and the county used it as a voting precinct and as a storage facility during those years. The old school building and the roughly four acres of property it occupies were traded to the county commission in a land and cash swap with the school board in 2016.
A new Head Start facility was built on the same property and the county also built a medical facility to lease to Wayne Memorial Hospital in recent years. The voting precinct was moved to the courthouse annex on Nichols Street and the county built a new archives storage building on Strickland Avenue behind the courthouse.
There are no immediate plans for the use of the property once the demolition is complete.
Grady Street Elementary was reportedly first opened in the 1940s and was expanded in 1958. After integration in 1970, Grady Street housed kindergarten through third grade and Lee Street, the old African American high school, was re-purposed and renamed Ware Street Elementary and housed grades four-six. Grady Street School closed in 1996 when it and Ware Street were merged to form Blackshear Elementary on Georgia Highway 121 South. Ware Street Elementary was later purchased and preserved as the Lee Street Resource Center by the Consolidated Men’s Club.
