The final Hamilton County Schools facilities master plan delivered by the MGT Consulting Group — which had been contracted for the job by the Hamilton County Board of Education — was dated March 3, 2020. Two weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
While the master plan may not have exactly been sitting on a shelf gathering dust since then, no significant movement has been made to implement what initially was termed a 10-year plan.
Last week, an announcement was made by Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp of the formation of a working group to address the school district facilities maintenance and future building needs using the MGT plan as its guide.
We don’t think it’s a moment too soon. It’s likely some decisions that come out of the group will include the closing of some schools and the merging of others, and it’s better to get those actions on the table for discussion sooner rather than later.
We don’t foresee any snap judgments being made, but neither do we see this can being kicked down the road very far since Wamp made the improvement of schools his first priority during his campaign this year.
“Plans for the future of our school facilities should be developed with a focus on excellence and efficiency, paving the way for our students to thrive in college prep and career prep pathways,” Wamp said in a news release. “This working group will establish a roadmap for Hamilton County to go from a laggard to a leader in the region in the quality of our public school facilities.”
So it’s worth taking a look at what was in that final plan — said at the time to cost $891 million — what’s been done since and what might be done in the near future.
The projects listed in Phase 0 — meaning they were ongoing or soon would be — included the relocation of Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts to a new, expanded location; the closing of Lakeside Academy and the transfer of its students to the new Harrison Elementary; and the completion of Harrison Elementary to accommodate students from the old Harrison Elementary, Hillcrest Elementary and Lakeside.
Five months after the master plan was submitted, members of the school board voted to move CSLA to the former Lakeside Academy and expland the facility to make room for a full K-12 school. This fall, students in grades kindergarten through fourth grade moved into the school, while students in grades 5-10 remained at the East Brainerd Road location to await the finish of construction. Grade 11 will be added in the 2023-24 school year and grade 12 in 2024-2025.
Ten months after the plan was published, in January 2021, the new, larger Harrison Elementary opened, its cost paid for by a de facto tax increased passed by the Hamilton County Commission in 2017.
One project suggested by MGT in Phase 1 — the closing of Tyner Middle School and combining it with Tyner Academy — is underway. Renderings of the new school were unveiled in June, construction is expected to start in December and the middle/high is expected to open in the fall of 2024, with the entire project finished in early 2025.
Among other Phase 1 recommendations, a new, larger Dupont Elementary School was envisioned that would accommodate students from the current Dupont Elementary, Alpine Crest Elementary and Rivermont Elementary, the latter two of which would close.
The phase also suggested combining the Normal Park Lower and Upper schools at the current Chattanooga High School Center for Creative Arts (CCA) site. CCA would either move to a renovated, repurposed Normal Park or to a new site.
Of those two, we think the elementary schools plan has a higher chance of occurring than the CCA/Normal Park swap.
The Phase 1 plan also foresaw a replacement Clifton Hills Elementary, which would accommodate some students from East Lake Elementary, and a new larger elementary on the former CSLA site that would bring in some students from the overcrowded East Brainerd Elementary, as well as some from Woodmore and East Ridge elementaries, and Barger Academy.
We think Clifton Hills has a good chance of being replaced, and we see the county holding on to the CSLA site for a future school. But the approval by the school board in March of a plan to purchase the former Cigna office building across from East Brainerd Elementary off Goodwin Road will give planners some breathing room on utilizing the CSLA site.
The phase also suggests a new Orchard Knob Middle School, which would accommodate Dalewood Middle School students. Both schools are well under capacity, so the plan looks good on paper, but combining students from one side of Missionary Ridge with students from the other will be easier said than done.
A number of school renovations are also suggested in the phase.
The MGT plan also laid out two other phases, which were less costly and included fewer closed and merged schools than Phase 1.
We think maintenance issues — some of which have been remedied in the last two years — also will be a vital part of the working group’s discussions. At one point, the schools were said to have nearly $1 billion in maintenance needs.
We look forward to see how the working group’s plans converge with or diverge from MGT’s recommendations, for which the school board paid nearly $500,000 to determine in 2018.