Thursday, the Horry County School District released the second “Request for Qualifications” for its nearly $150 million building project.
Interested parties will have until April 7th to send in their qualifications to the district.
The 18 page document lists the requirements the district is looking for to build the five new schools throughout Horry County.
The five schools the district looks to build are Carolina Forest, Myrtle Beach and Socastee Middle Schools, St. James Intermediate/Middle School and Socastee Elementary School.
The request includes specific references to “high performance – energy positive schools”.
A presentation on these types of schools was made to the school board last fall; weeks before it canceled the original request.
Unlike the first request in the fall, a law firm out of Columbia called Childs and Halligan wrote the new request.
School official’s deferred all questions in regards to the current request to the law firm.
Bick Halligan, with Childs and Halligan, said the law firm has worked with the district for nearly two decades.
However, in the past two years he says they have not worked with them once.
Halligan says the reason the district used the law firm’s services for this current request and not the first one is because the board decided to do a different type of building request where the designing architects also build the project
The school district was charged $200 per hour for the law firm’s services.
News 13 put an official request in to the district for the total dollar amount spent for this service.
School officials say the next step in the process is to select qualified architect companies which will then bid on the project.
In previous interviews, School Board Chairman, Joe Defeo, told me he expects all five schools to be completed in less than three years.
