Drivers on Wayah Street will soon spot something at the Franklin High School football stadium: a new chain-link fence with a windscreen. And it’ll be there for the next two years.
This fence will encompass the football stadium, practice field area, the eastern half of Panther Drive and wrap around the outside of the gym and agriculture department to include McCollum Drive up to the new pickup/drop-off area behind the media center/library building.
“It’s a blue fence with windscreen, says ‘Carroll Daniel’ on it, that encompasses the whole site,” said Joey Cain, senior superintendent with Carroll Daniel, who will be one of the leads on the project.
That fence will signify the start of the $135,553,575 Franklin High School and stadium project. After years and decades of dreams, hopes and plans, shovels will soon be in the ground.
The new FHS stadium with 3,400 permanent seats will be built in roughly the same spot, shifted slightly to the north and east, away from the student parking lot and Wayah Street. The new stadium will include a turf field, a regulation eight-lane track with field event spaces, separate concessions and restrooms on both sides, a field house for athletes and a new press box.
The anticipated completion date for the new stadium will be August 2026.
The locker rooms and weight room will be a part of the new 265,000-square-foot Franklin High School. Built on the practice field and Panther Drive, right next to where school will continue in the current buildings, this new building will be four stories, house a relocated Bartram Academy, a 450-seat auditorium, a 1,500-seat main gym with fully retractable bleachers, a 250-seat auxiliary gym, a full cafeteria and kitchen, dedicated band, chorus and theater space and dedicated academic space with science labs, career and technical education (CTE) labs, plus 31 core classrooms and a media center. The entire school will be ADA-compliant.
The school building is slated to be finished by August 2027 for the first day of class, 32 months from now.
Throughout most of the planning process, architect LS3P presented the project as having an August 2026 completion date for the school building, finishing at the same time as the stadium. Cain and Carroll Daniel Project Executive Dave Gotwalt said the project they bid on back in February/March always had an August 2027 completion for the school building.
After completing the new school, the last phase will shift to the other side of the property. The tear-down of the current FHS buildings will lead to the construction of a new parking lot and practice field in its place. This is slated for an April 2028 total completion, or 40 months from now.
First steps
Before the current FHS is torn down, the existing stadium will be the first to go.
“Through December, we’ll start mobilizing, which means we’re getting people coming on board,” Cain said. “It’s a slow start, so we’ll start actually doing some grubbing and clearing on Frogtown, which is the…slope on the back side. And then we’ll progress from there to getting our erosion control in. And then we’ll progress into demoing the buildings at the football stadium through the end of December [into] January.”
“Major excavation” won’t happen until January (2025) at the earliest or the end of February at the latest, Cain said. “So, it’ll start progressing toward the first of the year, start ramping up at that point.”
Carroll Daniel has taken residence in the Higdon house, sitting on a hill overlooking Franklin High from across Wayah Street. This will be the construction manager’s Franklin home for the next three-plus years.
“We’re glad to have it, it really worked out great for us,” Cain said, with Gotwalt calling the Higdon house “a lifesaver.”
Macon County purchased the nearly 13 acres of the Higdon property in 2023 for $1.358 million. There was talk of using the property for the school’s Career and Technical Education programs, however until recently it sat vacant and unused. The county leased the land to Macon County Schools soon after purchasing, but no clear plan for the future of the site has been approved.
Cain confirmed the Higdon property is not in Carroll Daniel’s scope of work, just a headquarters for meetings, both in person and remotely as the house has monitors and internet infrastructure set up.
The Higdon property will have two main parking areas. The first is on the open field near the roundabout, which will house buses and other construction vehicles. The second will be nearer to the student parking lot entrance along Wayah Street where subcontractors will park and employees can make the short walk to the site.
Working at an active school
Unlike some campus projects that are constructed on all-new sites, the Franklin High project will be on an active school ground, with construction work and classrooms not far from one another.
“We work on active campuses regularly,” Cain said. “It presents its own challenges simply because our number one goal is there’s no back and forth. We’re here, the students are here, and we try our very best to not impact that aspect of the project at all.”
Angie Kennedy, Carroll Daniel’s marketing director, said they will be “building in the background” and not impacting the students’ regularly scheduled activities.
The project has 51 subcontractors, from pavers to roofers to tilers, science lab casework, electricians and much more. While not all of them will be on-site at any given time, this will lead to some days with close to 100 workers on site, but a typical average of 50-60 when full-scale building is happening.
“At the first, it’ll be smaller groups, and when we’re full-blown building the campus, that’ll ramp up, and then at the end, it’ll ramp down,” Cain said.
Kennedy said each subcontractor has or will go through a “pretty robust” pre-qualification process, which includes a safety orientation and parameters of the work.
“They’ll have been talked to about interaction with students, plus safety as well,” Gotwalt said, noting that with parking and one entrance, they’ll be able to track who’s there and not.
Keeping on budget
The guaranteed maximum price for the new Franklin High School is $135.5 million. As a Construction Manager At-Risk project, Carroll Daniel is not to exceed that amount. For a project that has had much ado about money, the builders feel confident in their work.
“So, we’ve got a complete set of drawings, it’s been fully designed. All the bidders were able to see what the complete project looked like. We have detailed scopes of work that every one of them bid on because over time we’ve been able to find a good scope of work for each of the various type trades to make sure we cover the things,” Gotwalt said.
Bids are checked as they come in to make sure they align and hold the subcontractors to their bid amounts.
Answering one recent claim made at a recent Macon County Board of Commissioners meeting, both Gotwalt and Cain said there’s no truth about needing to ask for more money for the stadium turf.
Each month, Carroll Daniel will have Owner, Architect, Construction Manager (OACM) meetings with LS3P and Macon County officials, starting Dec. 5. The meetings are coordinated by LS3P and will include Interim County Manager Warren Cabe.
“We’ll meet monthly and review the status of the project from a schedule standpoint and from a financial standpoint,” Gotwalt said. “There’ll be updates as to where we are relative to any contingency usage or allowance usage on the project.”
Gotwalt said they are confident that the contingencies and allowances built into the project will cover any extra expenses. One of those is the slope stabilization on the Frogtown property.
When asked if there have been any changes to the project since they originally bid on the project earlier this year, Gotwalt and Cain said no.
Noise mitigation
An active construction site can be noisy and Carroll Daniel said they’ve already had discussions about certain upcoming days.
“We will have some early, and I’ve talked to everyone at the county about it,” Cain said. “We’ll have some early-morning pours and we’re going to try to mitigate interruptions as best we can, notify people that ‘hey, we’re going to have a 3 a.m. pour on this job. We’re going to have traffic running in our job with the concrete trucks.’ We’re going to get ahead of that to put the word out.”
Cain said there’s no ordinance prohibiting times of work at FHS, meaning Carroll Daniel can work on the site 24 hours if they choose, but typically will work daytime construction hours.
Partnering with the community
Kennedy said they plan to share the various milestones with the community, such as a topping-off ceremony and of course the ribbon cuttings.
“We are so excited to be building this school in Franklin because, quite frankly, our bread and butter is schools,” Kennedy said. “We have been building educational facilities, award-winning facilities, for a long time, and it’s something that is a skill that we’ve really worked on refining and honing. And we’re just grateful that this area trusted us to partner with them to build this special project.”
Gotwalt said Carroll Daniel wants to engage with the community. “We’ve got three years to get deeper and deeper into this community here, and I’m looking forward to it.”
With 45 years of experience in the construction business, Gotwalt has been with Carroll Daniel for five years. Cain has 40 years of experience and has been with Carroll Daniel for six years, working exclusively on building schools.
Cain plans to implement a work-based learning program to have kids interested in the construction field come on-site as part of a learning course.
“Like I said, we’re going to be a part of the community for three years, and we’re going to be an active part of the community for three years,” Cain said. “Not only just building your school. If there’s something we can help with, utilize, whatever, we try to do that.”