Even in the rain, the bright yellow playground equipment at Providence Elementary School in Temple looks inviting, but students won’t be there to enjoy it until next August.

The new Temple elementary school ran a little behind in construction because of the weather, but this past week the construction crew was applying final touches, painting, installing room signs and checking the security systems. The crew will be finished by the end of the month.

“We were anticipating this being done by Christmas,” said David Goldberg, chief of facilities for Carroll County Schools. “But knowing that we weren’t opening up until August, we didn’t get in a huge hurry.”

The school is the same basic plan as the other new schools the system has built. The front entrance is modeled after the new Mt. Zion Elementary School and the Bowdon Elementary School administrative wing. The two-story classroom wing has the same design as the new classroom wing at Central Elementary School. The gymnasium is the same as the one constructed at Whitesburg Elementary.

But the system is trying out a few new things at the 89,000-square-foot Providence Elementary. The cafeteria is slightly smaller and omitted a stage that was constructed at Mt. Zion Elementary’s cafeteria. Instead, the system bought a portable stage that can be set up either in the gymnasium or in the cafeteria.

The system also used carpet tiles, rather than a roll of carpet. Goldberg has wanted to try them out for a while.

“This way we can just rip up individual tiles and replace them,” Goldberg said.

The new school will house 27 classrooms, art and music rooms, the gymnasium and a media center. It has a classroom capacity of 450 students, but the core – the cafeteria, gymnasium, administration, media center, art and music rooms – can serve up to 725. That means the school could add another classroom wing at a later date if it needed to expand.

The county owns the surrounding land on which Temple Middle School also sits. Building adjacent to the middle school offered some monetary advantages. The Board of Education was looking at some other land that needed to be graded and had utilities supplied to it. This land was already graded and had utilities. Building here saved the system about $1 million, Goldberg said.

The school will come in slightly under its original $11,062,000 budget, thanks in part to the down economy. Companies are more willing to negotiate than they might have been in the past. For instance, Goldberg was able to negotiate down the cost of the furnishings for the school.

“People are hungry. They need business, so you can negotiate,” Goldberg said. “We’re getting a good deal on this building because of the market.”

But opening the building is going to be a large expense for the system, something that is extremely difficult in these lean budget years. Chief Financial Officer Greg Denney estimates it will cost about $675,000 in operating costs to open the new school next August.

Much of that is annual costs, and about $70,000 of the cost will be one-time expenditures, such as outfitting the new nurse’s office. About $600,000 will be annual operating expenses.

The school will add to the cost of utilities for the system. Denney estimates that $77,500 of that $600,000 will supply all the utilities to the school. Some of that will be offset by the closing of the mobile classrooms at Temple, Villa Rica, Glanton-Hindsman and Ithica elementary schools.

“Those mobiles are very expensive to heat and cool because they’re not very well insulated,” Denney said.