Contractors’ signs poked from the lawn of Normal Park Upper School on Tuesday, and inside the newly renovated building, the paint was fresh and sneakers were white, white, white.
“It’s amazing what they’ve done,” said Tristen Walker, 11, of Soddy-Daisy, who was at the school in June, helping move desks and prepare for renovations as part of the “Bring it Together” week. “It went from graffiti all over the walls to really colorful classrooms.”
Normal Park Upper, formerly Chattanooga Middle Museum Magnet School in North Chattanooga, was completely renovated this summer with donated labor and supplies from the community.
Students there were among 40,000 who started back to school Tuesday in 78 Hamilton County schools. Two schools, Soddy and Orchard Knob elementaries, are in new buildings this year, and another school, Signal Mountain Middle-High, is new.
Despite confusion in the school’s new six-lane parking area, Soddy Elementary principal Lee Ann Mills said she was looking forward to a great year in her school’s new building.
“It was a great, great, great day,” she said.
Calls to Orchard Knob principal Marthel Young were not returned Tuesday.
Inside her bright blue and green classroom at Normal Park, sixth-grade language arts teacher Heather Brown asked students to share their favorite movie and other likes and dislikes as a way to get to know one another. Of the 80 sixth-graders who started at the school Tuesday, 45 were new to Normal Park, a dynamic that made quelling first-day jitters especially important, she said.
“Creating a community — because we’ve got kids coming from all over the county — helping them feel a sense of community and ownership in this new school is really important to me,” she said.
“They all bring something with them,” Ms. Brown said. “We all have special skills and talents, and when we combine those special skills and talents we can do great, amazing things.”
New student Solomonna Gaoa, 11, of Chattanooga, said he has been going to bed at 8:30 p.m. for the past two weeks to prepare for the first day of school, but he laid awake until 11 p.m. Monday, worrying. None of his friends from the Calvin Donaldson Environmental Science Academy in Alton Park joined him at his new school, but the first day went better than he expected.
“Now that I’m here, I think it’s a good environment for me,” he said. “But I felt like, ‘They’re all going to have fun and I’m not going to be able to go to the party.’”
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