Warren County Board of Education approved external mowing bids for five county schools to address ongoing maintenance challenges across the district.
Director of Schools Dr. Grant Swallows said the decision to outsource the outlying campuses follows a previous move to bring all mowing services in-house that ultimately proved difficult to manage with existing staff. Swallows said the district opened bids for 25 scheduled cuts at individual schools to ensure the grounds are maintained.
“What you all have said and what many in our community have said is that ultimately when we brought our mowing back in-house, we just simply did not have enough mowers on the crew,” Swallows said. “I want to publicly say again that that crew work extremely hard. They were just working against a lot of things.”
The board awarded the bids to two different companies based on the lowest submissions for each specific campus.
Swallows said the district’s internal mowing crew will now focus exclusively on campuses located within the city. By outsourcing the county schools, the district is reducing the total area the internal crew must maintain from approximately 180 acres to less than 100 acres.
“One of the biggest issues with what we did is that our schools are also very spread out,” Swallows said. “So our teams are having to travel, but the issue that we have is that our guys work from 7:00 to 3:00 or 8:00 to 4:00 and so that was not being able to get everything that needed to be done. And so some, by bidding some of this out with some other folks, that would give us the opportunity for them not to have to work in those parameters of hours.”
The meeting also served as the final session for outgoing board members James Bennett and Larry Judkins. Bennett concludes 50 years of service to the district as a teacher, coach, administrator, and board member, while Judkins departs after serving a total of 16 years on the board.
“Like Dr. Swallows said, it’s been my goals all the years to have the best school system in the state of Tennessee,” Bennett said. “It’s been my goals for every student, no matter what their academic is, of ability, to learn and to where they will be someone when they leave our school system.”
