Full of promise and new beginnings, registration day at the new East Ridge Elementary School also gave two communities the chance to make nice.
In the year since the Hamilton County Board of Education voted to close McBrien Elementary and combine it with East Ridge Elementary in a new building, the contention over the move mostly has died down. Still, some were anxious about how the beginning of the school year would go.
Although some McBrien parents were a little sad about the loss of their school, most agreed the state-of-the-art new combo elementary is a pretty good consolation prize.
“I was even excited,” said Jamaica Carnes, whose three children went to McBrien last year. “I didn’t get a chance to see (the new school) until today. They did a good job.”
And all the school’s teachers, some of whom used to teach at McBrien, exhaled a collective sigh of relief at how smoothly registration seemed to go Wednesday.
“The communities are really coming together,” said fifth-grade teacher Amy Low, a former McBrien instructor. “There’s been a lot of effort to bond with each other.”
With two school communities coming under one roof, there will be more introductions, said second-grade teacher Sandra Feher.
“There’s just a lot of new faces, a lot of people don’t know each other,” she said. “There’s going to be a lot of, ‘What’s your name again?'”
East Ridge parent Betty Johnson said her only lingering fear was the size of the building.
“It’s just so big,” she said.
The $15 million, 120,000-square-foot building has a capacity of 850 students. The building was constructed last year on the site of the former East Ridge Elementary.
School officials say they won’t have enrollment estimates until after school starts Wednesday. But spokeswoman Danielle Clark said that, if the past is any indication, the new school will be larger than the sum of its parts.
“What we notice when we open a new school is the natural migration, plus kids coming from private school and homeschool,” she said.
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