Kemper County School District welcomes Kemper County Elementary

MERIDIAN, Miss. (WTOK) - With construction well underway, The Kemper County School District looks forward to adding a new elementary school in Dekalb.

Kemper County Elementary will be a STEM school with updated facilities.

Superintendent of Kemper County School District Hilute Hudson said the district is excited about the school and believes it will be something the community can be proud of.

“We plan to build a K-5 elementary school,” said Hudson. “That location is very good to us. It’s going to be here in Dekalb. That puts all of our schools in about a three-mile radius. We’re operating five schools, but we have an elementary that is out in Scooba but in isolation. It’s an older school as well as our upper elementary. This new school is going to be good for us. For one, it gives the kids a good learning environment. It’s going to have some state-of-the-art things, but it also the savings that it will add, it’s going to allow us to do some projects. We do have some other things we want to do. We want to do some things with our extracurriculars, and we also want to be able to add more programs for our students as well. One thing that we like about our new elementary school is it will have a storm shelter. I mean, we know that we’ve had our area is always ravaged by storms. So when we’ve got that, it’s going to hold about 900 people and we’re going to open up to the community, having people being able to come in and just really feel safe during that time.”

In addition to the storm shelter, the new STEM school will be equipped with a multipurpose room for after-school events, a media center with state-of-the-art technology, specialty courses, and a science lab that will take students beyond the books.

“It’s been a long time since Kemper has built a school, so we tried to make sure that this school will be sustainable for the next 50 years and something we can be proud of,” added Hudson.

Construction will end around mid-December. Kemper County Elementary aims to be open to new students in Spring 2024.