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Cooper: CSLA finally gets go-ahead that Hamilton County Commissioner Tim Boyd has spent his commission tenure seeking

Staff File Photo By C.B. Schmelter / Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts is likely to be in its new home sometime in 2022.
Staff File Photo By C.B. Schmelter / Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts is likely to be in its new home sometime in 2022. Staff File Photo By C.B. Schmelter / Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts is likely to be in its new home sometime in 2022.

By Clint Cooper 4 min read

“Hallelujah, yes!”

With those words, Hamilton County Commissioner Tim Boyd voted last week in favor of a resolution authorizing the county to spend about $30.7 million with TriCon Inc. for a new home for Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts (CSLA).

The 9-0 vote was the culmination of work the District 8 commissioner has done during his nearly 11 years on the commission in trying to get the magnet school out of its crumbling, nearly 75-year-old building on East Brainerd Road.

The vote accepting the bid includes both renovation work on the former 92,000-square-foot Lakeside Elementary School off Highway 58 and a new, 50,000-square-foot addition that will accommodate what eventually will be a 1,000-student K-12 school.

When the Hamilton County Board of Education voted to relocate CSLA to the school last August, Boyd said the site wasn’t his first choice but was “the best we could do with what we currently have.”