MARIETTA - The Cobb County School Board voted to rebuild Clarkdale Elementary School at a new site adjacent to Cooper Middle School on Thursday night.

In a motion made by board member David Morgan, the board voted 6-0, with Alison Bartlett abstaining, to approve plans to move forward with the elementary school and also appoint an architect to begin drafting those plans. Following the vote, several Clarkdale community members in the audience clapped and cheered for their new school.

Plans to rebuild the school, which was ruined in the September floods, were first presented to the board at its meeting on Jan. 28. Following that meeting, the district conducted a town hall forum for the Clarkdale community on Feb. 2 and received overwhelming response from the community in favor of plans to rebuild the school on the Cooper site.

The district said it recommended rebuilding the school on the Cooper site because it did not see the current Clarkdale site as a safe place for the new school. But FEMA came back to the district on Feb. 13 giving the OK to build on the current site, saying that it was outside the 100-year flood plain, an answer the district clearly would not accept.

On Thursday night, however, Superintendent Fred Sanderson announced that FEMA had changed its mind. According to Sanderson, when he and district leaders met with FEMA and GEMA that day, the government entity said it had changed its mind, giving the go ahead to build the school on the new site, waiving the 10 percent penalty in funding that FEMA usually applies when a project is rebuilt on an alternative site.

"They had decided to award an "improved project," is what they call it technically," Sanderson said. "There won't be a penalty to build on an alternative site, that's in essence what it was."

Sanderson and district officials said they expect to receive $1.8 million from FEMA and GEMA for the new $19.2 million school.

But an issue arose when board member Alison Bartlett discovered that the board oversight Facilities and Technology committee had not voted to recommend building the new school, something it generally does before the board votes to move ahead with construction projects. Dr. John Abraham agreed with Bartlett, saying they should table the vote on Clarkdale until the F&T Committee has time to review and make a recommendation on the plans.

Board member Holli Cash was obviously annoyed by this discussion, maintaining that the Clarkdale plans had already been discussed at length, and that if anyone had any issues they would have come forward and addressed the board by now.

Abraham did win out in the end when he made a motion to amend the item, asking Doug Shepard the SPLOST oversight director, to come back to the board with the architect's site plan for vote. This amendment passed 4-2 with Cash and David Morgan dissenting and Bartlett abstaining.

Bartlett said that her concern is that the board might be moving too fast on Clarkdale, and potentially overlooking land issues with the new site.

"I believe that we need to rebuild a Clarkdale and I support the community, I'm just afraid we're rushing it," Bartlett said.

Sanderson did say that FEMA urged the district to move forward with its plan in a timely fashion, but went on to say that the board's approval of the site plan would not hurt the overall construction timeline.

Morgan, who represents the Clarkdale community, said he was pleased with the outcome of the vote and confident in the district's plans.

"I think the people impacted most directly in that community, they're seeing tangible steps in terms of us moving forward," Morgan said. "And I think that it's going to be a win-win all the way around."

Sanderson said that the district hopes to have a new school open within the next 18 months.

In other business, the board voted unanimously to approve a new student scheduling system for its middle and high school students.

It also voted to approve an architect for renovations at Lassiter High School, and to grant a one-time waiver to bid out architectural services for a Smyrna Replacement Elementary School.

At the beginning of the meeting the board pulled a discussion item regarding a vote on artificial turf, the same vote that a judge ruled to halt on Tuesday after a hearing regarding a lawsuit to stop the district from using SPLOST money on the turf. The board did however; hear from three district employees about benefits of turf.