The Knoxville School Board heard a presentation from Boyd Jones regarding assessment findings at Northstar Elementary at their meeting Monday night.

In a presentation given by Boyd Jones, they laid out what are high priority, medium priority, and low priority items that need to be addressed in terms of renovations at Northstar. The base price to take care of the needs at Northstar to bring the building up to modern codes, standards, and district expectations around education would be approximately $22.5 Million. That includes only taking care of items that need to be addressed, not an entire renovation. The school board will eventually decide if they want to invest in improvements to Northstar or if they would like to go forward with building a new school on land that has been set aside in the Veterans District. The estimated cost for a new elementary school would be $36 Million, according to Boyd Jones. Superintendent Cassi Pearson says the next steps are to assemble a group to provide a recommendation. 

“The next step I think is really exciting, the board will assemble a task force to really dig into all the information. They can ask all of the possibility questions and get some additional estimates, take a look at that space, along with the space at the VA District that could be a potential site as well. That task force will do a lot of research, have a lot of conversations, and ultimately bring the board a recommendation. We expect that to happen in the next 6-12 months.”

Hear more from Pearson on today’s Let’s Talk Knoxville.