Board approves modular at Grand Caillou Middle School

The Terrebonne Parish School Board unanimously approved a nearly half-million-dollar bid for a 10-classroom modular building at Grand Caillou Middle School at last Tuesday’s meeting.

New York-based M Space Holdings, LLC submitted the $471,800 proposal.

The company has 75 days to complete the building once it is notified to proceed, said Merlin Lirette, a Houma architect who manages the board’s construction projects.

“They anticipate a four- to six-week delivery time to the site,” Lirette said. “We already have all permits acquired, so we can notify M Space as soon as (last Wednesday) to begin.”

The project will cost over $1 million including architecture and engineering fees, connecting the modular building to the drainage and sewer system, installing electrical wiring and pouring a concrete foundation.

The modular building will be 154 feet by 64 feet wide and just under 10,000 square feet in area.

The addition is an effort to alleviate overcrowding at Grand Caillou Elementary by moving its students to the middle school.

In August, Grand Caillou Middle will have close to 700 prekindergarten through sixth grade students, while Grand Caillou Elementary will house just over 200 seventh and eighth graders.

In other action, the board unanimously approved resolutions countering efforts to build an oil storage tank near a Gibson middle school and opposing a push by the state for more control over local school boards.

Houston-based Plains Market-ing, LP, a subsidiary of Plains All-American Pipeline, applied for a permit to build a 300,000-barrel external floating roof tank approximately one mile from Greenwood Elementary School.

The board passed a similar resolution on Jan. 6, but with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of Environmen-tal Quality reviewing the permit application, board member L.P. Bordelon said the action is necessary again.

“If they put one they’re going to put two. If they put two, they’ll put four,” he said. “I’m not anti-oil, but I am against the continuous insistence of putting storage tanks near schools. There are storage tank farms further west where they can put them.”

The board and Gibson residents have been fighting since 2006 to bar the storage tank from the area.

In the resolution against school board reforms, Schools Superin-tendent Philip Martin wrote that the state’s effort “infringes upon the basic premise of democracy” and “diminishes local citizens’ direct control and contact with their elected officials.”

State Superintendent of Educa-tion Paul Pastorek proposed several changes for school boards, such as term limits, pay reduction, requiring a two-thirds majority to fire superintendents and removing the board’s ability to approve personnel decisions.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), which oversees state public education, decided to ask the Legislature to develop a task force to determine whether changes to local school boards are needed.