The new school building will be built at the intersection of County Home Road and Northern Drive in Conover, which is about two miles north of the district’s current school, the Hickory Daily Record reports.
Superintendent Barry Redmond says that the new school will have similar architectural plans to the Grandview Middle School of Hickory Public Schools system: all the Catawba County Schools are one-storey, but the proposed plot for the new school has an elevation drop of around 80 feet, making the site more suitable for a two- to three-storey building.
Grandview Middle School is a multiple-storey building built with bricks, but Newton-Conover would incorporate some alterations and modifications in the entry area plan of the new school. Soil and other environmental tests at the new site will commence in the middle of the year and construction is expected to start by July 2010 to open the school by August, 2012.
Once the construction is over, the current school will be converted into an elementary school, Redmond added.
