WYNNE — The Wynne School Board voted last night to hire a new architect for the rebuild of Wynne High School.
Superintendent Dr. Kenneth Moore said the district is no longer working with Memphis-based ARCH 1010, owned by Josh Bellaire, on the project.
The school board voted to name Polk Stanley Wilcox, which is based in Little Rock, as the new architect of record for the project.
Dr. Moore said that without an architect in place, the rebuild of the high school would have had to shut down. The district received a five-day grace period from the Wynne Building Inspector’s Office to continue with the project through Friday.
“There have been some issues with just getting information. It’s called an RFI, but it’s a Request for Information. Any time some clarity needs to be had on a drawing or maybe something was overlooked,” Moore said. “For example, you’ve got electrical running to an area where a light would be but then there was no light in there, or say there was a light but there wasn’t any electricity. You request information. Did you mean for there to be electricity? Did you mean for there to be a light? Those are just some examples I made up. But, you have those come in from time to time, especially on a project of this size.
“There were beginning to be issues where we didn’t get an answer in a timely manner. We’ve been very pressed on that,” he added. “Really since March it’s kind of gotten worse. Because this is such a time crunch project and this is going on year four since the tornado when we actually get moved in, we told Mr. Bellaire we aren’t going to accept any more delays. At this time, we felt like it was time to part ways because they were building up to a point it was getting very hard to manage.”
Polk Stanley Wilcox had been partnering with ARCH 1010 on the project.
The district ended its relationship with ARCH 1010 at 5 p.m. last Friday. The company had been involved in several projects in the district, including the new kindergarten wing, which opened with the start of the 2026-27 school year.
In other news, the Wynne School Board voted to increase the pay rate for the shuttle driver from $12 an hour to $14 an hour and approved a title-only change for substitute, field trip and extracurricular drivers in the salary schedule.
The meeting also included the Annual Report to Patrons. The district will be sharing a flipbook of the report on social media.
The board also agreed to hire Sam Douglas as a school resource officer for Wynne Junior High School, replacing Brittney Eskridge who has returned to the Wynne Police Department.
The Wynne School Board will next meet Monday, Sept. 21.
