Monday night the Vance Charter School held a pep rally to help kick off its capital campaign. The event was held at McGregor Hall in downtown Henderson and was well attended by students, teachers, staff and other interested members of the community. The building seats about 950 people and the room was very full.
The Vance Charter School, which is now located on Dabney Drive inside the Henderson Mall, will move in the fall to its new location on Ross Mill Road. At the present time, local general contracting firm H.G. Reynold is retrofitting the former Clayton Homes building for the school’s use.
The overriding intent of the Charter School’s capital campaign is to help complete certain areas of the building such as the gymnasium.
The school will also be expanding to cover high school grades over the next few years with the intent to increase the school population by 20 percent per year until it reaches the capacity of the new building, which is figured to be around 1000 students. Enrollment presently is about 550 kids.
The theme of the pep rally and of the capital campaign is “Taking Excellence To The Next Level.” A 15-minute documentary-style news and information video was shown which described the school’s beginnings and how the school’s board of directors, staff and teachers intended to continue to improve.
A math experiment was conducted, for fun but also to prove a point. A couple of buckets were passed through the crowd and those in attendance dropped about $3,000.00 into those buckets. They added it up on the spot. Vance Charter School board member Josh Towne then took the stage and described the economic impact of each person giving that same amount, a dollar or two each day, for the next year. It would add up to over $1 million and nearly $5.5 million over the next five years. That kind of money would not only help cover the debt of the new building but also help complete discretionary parts of the building like the gym as well as help with the high school grade level expansion.