MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A Fall 2027 opening for a $72 million career and technical education center in Monongalia County is the goal for the Board of Education. The timeline comes from the architecture firm DLR Group while presenting their plan to construct the facility to the board in a special session Tuesday night.
“This was really helpful for our board, to kind of get a focus and start to, really, to develop a vision of what we want this school to look like,” said Monongalia County School Superintendent Eddie Campbell.
The “Renaissance Center” intends to be a campus similar to the Monongalia Technical Education Center that would serve county high school and future middle school students. The planned 7,560-square foot facility would include state-of-the art STEM classrooms that can accommodate career fields in health sciences, technology, architecture, transportation and hospitality located just off of Interstate 79 and a short distance from all three county high schools.
“This is what Monongalia County schools need to be,” said Campbell on the expanded classrooms and amenities proposed for the “Renaissance Center.” “This is the future of education, not only in the county, but for this state and this region,” he said.
The next step for the Monongalia County Board of Education is to plan for funding (via bond referendums) for the approximately $72 million “Renaissance Center” that Campbell expects to be a low ball estimate (depending on inflation, etc.). While cost estimates are not set in stone, board members plan for continued support from a county that has very supportive financially over the years.
“Mon County in general is really supportive of education,” said Monongalia County Board of Education President Ron Lytle. “So as long as they see us going through the process and really analyzing what moving forward is going to look like, what industries we can partner with, what industries we help can bring into the community and what industries that are here we can help serve,” he said.
According to the the timeline presented by the DLR Group, the goal is to address bond referendums by May 2024. If funding moves forward without any snags, the firm also stated that design and construction of the “Renaissance Center” could be completed in time for the start of the 2027-28 school year. Though the project is still in the early stages with a full fledged design of the facility still in development, the Monongalia County Board of Education is excited by the project’s potential and what it could bring to the county.
“You want to make sure that you get this right, that’s super important,” said Campbell. “If our community, our state is going to invest in something like this, getting it right is super, super important, so that design process is going to be something we’re going to have to walk through and take our time with,” he said.