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Ground was officially broken on the new Chambers County High School on Friday, at a ceremonial groundbreaking held beside Rams Stadium in Valley. 

An audience crowded under a big tent and heard speeches from the planning team, Representative Debbie Wood, Senator Randy Price, Valley Mayor Leonard Riley, CCSD Board President Jeffery Finch and CCSD Superintendent Casey Chambley.

Wood and Price shared the sentiment that it was time to look forward and “get on the train,” as Wood put it.

“Leaders don’t always know what the end will be when they navigate a path for us to follow. But we must follow. We must get engaged. We must stay excited about the future, so that we don’t die,” Wood said. “Don’t stand in a corner and criticize people. Get on the train.”

Riley highlighted the fact that the city of Valley will be doing some of the work on the new high school. 

“Not only are we donating the land, we’re going to do rough grating, we’re going to build the entrances into the school. And we are going to do as much as much as we can to save the board of education [money],” Riley said. 

Chambley discussed the journey that had led to the occasion.

“I hope that we can look back on this day with a sense of pride, but also maybe with a little bit of amnesia,” Chambley said. “Not to forget our past or our traditions that we have made and that have made us strong, but to maybe forget some of the pain and the struggle that we have all had to endure to get us here.”

Kenneth Vines, mayor of LaFayette, was not a speaker but was in attendance. He was one of the members who ceremonially broke ground. 

All the speakers were given a shovel and hard hat, as well as some of the architecture, planning and design team members and community members involved. They shoveled the dirt together, marking the literal and figurative groundbreaking occasion and beginning of the new school.