MURRAY, Ky. — Murray Independent School District leaders and community members gathered Wednesday to break ground on the new Murray Elementary School, set to be located at the corner of Doran and Wiswell roads.
Celebrating the start of construction was Superintendent David Meinschein, who said the district has grown "tremendously." With the district rapidly outgrowing its current accommodations, Meinschein said the new school will be an investment into the the future of the students.
"It will have multiple classrooms, 24 classrooms total," Meinschein said. "It'll have a gym and a very large cafeteria that can also be converted into a gym. But we'll have a new STEM room. We'll have a new art room, a music room. Currently, a lot of those spaces are on carts. So, wonderful opportunity to create a learning space for our students."
The school will house the district's kindergarten through fourth-grade classes. Construction is expected to last around two years, with the new school opening in August 2028.
"Our district's very high performing, and this space will allow our students to come into it and to grow and to learn and become whatever they want to be in life — an engineer, a lawyer, a doctor, an electrician, a plumber, or perhaps even a superintendent," Meinschein said.
School board chair Richard Crouch shared the history of the school district, with the property-seeking process beginning about six years ago. He said the new school is a culmination of a lot of hard work and will serve as a new beginning in the district's history.
"[Murray Independent] School District actually started in 1872," Crouch said. "That was before the 1892 Kentucky Constitution, which required the legislature to fund schools. There's been a school building on the site — what we now call Murray Middle School — since 1922, and that's current... Current Murray High School was constructed in 1970."
The new Murray Elementary School construction comes amid upgrades and expansions to other buildings in the district, according to Crouch, who said he expects the new school to serve the district for decades.
"U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said, 'A quality education is the closest thing to magic in the United States today,'" Crouch said. "And based on the test scores in the current Murray Elementary School building, magic occurs in that building every day."