The new Walton High School building is open, and on Sunday afternoon, the day before classes were set to begin, several hundred students, parents, elected officials and others celebrating ribbon-cutting ceremonies and an open house.
Among the honored guests, in addition to local officials, were Georgia School Superintendent Richard Woods, U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson and newly elected Congresswoman Karen Handel.
The three-story, $48 million classroom and administrative office structure replaces a 42-year-old main building that has been overcrowded for years. The old building will eventually give way to the second phase of the Walton project that is to include a new gymnasium and fine arts building scheduled for completion in 2019.
The 300,000-plus-square-foot main building is around 40 percent bigger than what it is replacing. Walton opened in 1975, at a time when rapid growth in East Cobb was vastly overburdening school capacity.
Isakson, whose children and granddaughter attended Walton, told the audience that while he was working as an East Cobb real estate broker in the early 1970s, then-Cobb school superintendent Kermit Keenum warned him that new schools in the area—especially high schools—had to be built, and fast.
Isakson helped the school system with finding land, and noted that the Bill Murdock Road properties on which Walton and nearby Dodgen Middle School are located cost around $4,500.
“That would cost at least 10 times that amount today,” said Isakson, who was formerly the president of Northside Realty. He called the new Walton building “a pearl of beauty.”
He was among the speakers who kept referencing the education SPLOST (or special local option sales tax) funding that paid for the new Walton building. Isakson said more than $6.8 billion has been spent on school construction across Georgia with SPLOST funding, and he thanked Cobb leaders for leading the way in changing the state constitution to allow for such referenda.
Isakson also said it’s not just bricks and mortar, but “teachers, parents and students” that make a school community strong.
