Chattanooga: Teachers, students adjust to hectic schedule

Even though he woke up at 5 a.m., Principal Eddie Gravitte wasn’t the first person at the new Signal Mountain Middle-High School on Tuesday morning.

“I turned on the TV, and the first thing I see is a reporter standing outside the building,” he said. “They camped out at 4:45.”

And so began the first day of classes at the new mountain school, which opened Tuesday along with 77 other Hamilton County public schools.

Before the 7:15 a.m. start time, traffic around the middle-high school’s entrance was congested, as some confused middle school parents tried dropping off their students at the high-school entrance.

THE DAY UNFOLDS

At 9:09 a.m., the bell to change classes already is five minutes behind, and Mr. Gravitte must make a decision. Flipping through a detailed class schedule, he pauses for some mental calculation.

“I think our bells are off a little bit,” he says to school secretary Lizetta Paturalski. “I don’t know if I need to make an intercom call.”

“Yeah, I think we’re about seven minutes off,” she confirms.

Giving Mrs. Paturalski the task of figuring out the late-ringing bells, Mr. Gravitte sets out on a school tour with system Superintendent Jim Scales, school board member Chip Baker and school system Director of Transportation Wayne Hendrix.

After quick stops in history and computer classrooms, the men step into a high-school Spanish class, teeming with at least 45 students.

“So what do you think about this? Two thumbs up?” Dr. Scales asks the students, raising his own two thumbs.

Silence.

Slowly one set of hands, then another raise up. With all of their thumbs eventually in the air, a few students glance around the room and chuckle.

“That class is way too crowded,” Mr. Gravitte says as he walks out. “It needs to have no more than 35 students.”

Walking across the pastel-tile floors, Mr. Gravitte pauses every couple of steps to rub out a black scuff mark with the toe of his shoe.

“They’re such an eyesore,” he mutters. “I spend half my day rubbing out scuff marks.”

Black Powerade clipboard in hand, Mr. Gravitte scans his schedule again.

“Lunch starts at 10:28 — it’s really brunch. This is where I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I hope it works,’” he says of the hour-long lunch break, half of which is for middle schoolers before the transition to high school lunches.

Picking up his pace, the principal heads to the cafeteria at 9:40 to check on food preparation.

“All right, you got my steak and lobster ready?” he asks with a laugh.

“Does it look ready?” someone shouts from the back of the kitchen.

In the cafeteria, Mr. Gravitte discovers that staff is running about 10 minutes behind, so the schedule for the remainder of the day will have to be tweaked.

“Hopefully disaster has been averted, but that remains to be seen,” he says on his way to a sixth-grade teachers’ meeting.

'BACK TO THE BOTTOM'

Baby-blue Pottery Barn lunchbox in hand, student Elizabeth Webb jokingly corrects a friend.

“It’s the ‘dining hall,’” she says emphatically, with a smile. “They told us it’s not a cafeteria, it’s a dining hall.”

Dropping her lunch, she leans down to help fellow sixth-grader Ashley Chamberlain open her bright-red locker, which seems to be sticking.

“You have to go past the number,” she says several times.

Locker open, the girls join some friends, who all graduated last year from Thrasher Elementary, and they head to the dining hall. After settling into a round table near the back of the open room and the floor-to-ceiling windows, Elizabeth starts in on her daily lunch routine. With her fist, she begins pounding a plastic bag with her sandwich inside.

“Oops,” she says, taking the sandwich out, “I only smoosh my PB&J — this is chicken salad.”

There are giggles all around the table.

The conversation turns from the new school to the swim team and the tragedy of watermelon juice spilled on new pants.

“I’m kind of scared of all the homework,” pipes up sixth-grader Haydon Tucker, 11. “People say it’s a lot different than last year.”

“Yeah, I was so nervous last night I couldn’t get to sleep and I felt nauseous,” adds 10-year-old Anne Marie Darke.

“Fifth grade was so fun, I was afraid about this year; it’s kind of hard to not get lost,” Haydon says. “And we walked by and the high schoolers were like ‘Oh, look at all the cute sixth-graders.’ We were at the top of everyone in the building last year, and now we’re right back to the bottom.”

ALL IN A DAY'S WORK

Percussion class goes smoothly for high school band teacher Robert Groves, so the day begins without a hitch.

Monitoring the halls in between classes, he stumbles upon a fistfight and wastes no time stepping in to break it up.

“I have no idea what happened, I was just standing there. I’m trained for this, though,” he says, flexing.

After grabbing a slice of pizza, a container of pineapple and some 2 percent milk, he retreats to a teachers-only lunchroom just off the main dining hall.

The cafeteria din is muffled behind the glass windows as he sits down for the first time and takes a deep breath. All things considered, the day has gone pretty smoothly, he says.

Before band class, Mr. Groves will have a planning session, but on the first day of school, his to-do list isn’t very long.

“I’ve already planned my entire day,” he says, taking a chug from his milk carton. “Now I’m just relaxing.”