A brutal, 12-month period for Hamilton County Schools that began with the pool-cue rape of an Ooltewah High School basketball player a few days before Christmas in 2015 got a little worse Thursday with the announcement that Signal Mountain may form its own school district.
If the Town Council forms a committee to study such an idea during its agenda session today, and the subsequent plan is approved by a majority of the town’s 6,000 registered voters, the county system would lose 2,500 students at three of its top performing schools.
Over the past year, the county school district has wrestled with the fallout from the rape case, low test scores, a scalding state response to its low-performing schools plan, the resignation of its superintendent, a pitched battle over the selection of an interim superintendent, the election defeat of three school board members, the gentle threat of a state takeover of its low-performing schools and last month’s bus crash that killed six Woodmore Elementary School students.
Signal Mountain residents, who have talked of an independent district for years and even voted to raise their sales tax by a half cent to provide $10 million toward the construction of Signal Mountain Middle/High School, may have had enough. Other Hamilton County municipalities could follow, but they don’t have Signal Mountain’s advantages of a median family income of $130,997.
The money would be important, because the responsibility for repairs, insurance and future construction in an independent district would fall on the municipality. However, the schools would continue to receive the per-pupil funding from the state and county governments they do now. Only the oversight would change.