The Financial Management committee of the Warren County commission met Friday morning, and voted unanimously to approve the Warren County School System’s entry into a contract to purchase the property currently housing the McMinnville-Warren County Senior Center.
According to Director of Schools Dr. Grant Swallows, the property will eventually be used for hands-on, real-life lessons in Career and Technical Education (CTE) and vocational education.
“I am very excited about the possibilities we are securing by adding this new property to the school system,” Swallows said. “When the State of Tennessee made the Innovative Schools Model (ISM) grants available to districts two years ago, Warren County identified funds that would establish a space where students can explore careers and programs as well as receive valuable work experience during the school day.
“We have looked at a few different properties but those were either out of our price range or didn’t fully meet the needs of the proposal. The Senior Center property came available at the right time and is a perfect place to see this vision come to life.”
The Innovative Model Schools grant is a $560 million statewide program awarded by the Tennessee Department of Education last year to 137 public school districts and 45 public charter schools to invest in students and their postsecondary success.
During Friday morning’s meeting, Swallows described several CTE and vocational programs that could potentially use the new space, including cosmetology, mechatronics and many others.
“Our goal in finding this space is to try to create an area where all of our kids can see everything that we’re doing,” he said. “We’re really putting our kids to work, and making this a real-life area for our kids to come and work on those kinds of things, and do things during the day they don’t normally get to do.”
The Warren County School Board met in special session Monday evening to discuss the purchase of the Morrison St. property, and after touring the buildings, unanimously agreed to allow Swallows to negotiate, settle and close the purchase based on an offer of $700,000. The Senior Center will still use the Morrison Street space to serve its many participants as normal until they finalize their move to Three Star Mall, at which point the school system will begin plans for any renovations needed to transform the space to fit its needs.
