Addison McMullin, 17, credits the Chattanooga High Center for Creative Arts for teaching her that she wants to be a professional dancer and make the world a better place through the arts.
The CCA senior said she wants to keep the opportunities and safe space she experienced at the school alive for others.
That’s part of why she’s against the school facilities plan’s recommendation to relocate the school to the former BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee’s Golden Gateway site off U.S. 27 at West M.L. King Boulevard.
While McMullin wouldn’t personally be affected by the proposal, at least one of her two younger siblings who also attend the school could be.
“Uprooting and taking us somewhere else will, kind of, just destroy everything that we built,” she said by phone. “It’ll kind of just take away this spirit that CCA has. It’ll take away the soul.”
Some members of the Center for Creative Arts community said they were concerned about the lack of details concerning the proposal while others questioned whether a new school building would have all of the facilities students need.
In December, Superintendent Justin Robertson presented an updated list of facilities priorities, which included a $50 million proposal that called for relocating the Center for Creative Arts to the Gateway site. The school, potentially renamed as Chattanooga High School, would serve middle and high school students, as well as have two pathways: one for fine arts and another for career and technical education.
The technical side would initially start with a computer science pathway with the intention of creating others. County Mayor Weston Wamp in a previous interview listed engineering, automotive technology and logistics as career pathways that would be served well by the downtown location.
The school would also create additional sixth to 12th grade seats, which would allow for Howard Connect, a no-zone magnet school that shares a campus with The Howard School, to be closed and help relieve overcrowding at Howard.
Staff photo by C.B. Schmelter / The auditorium is seen from the stage at Chattanooga Center for Creative Arts in 2019.Valerie McMullin, Addison’s mother, said she’d expected her children to be excited about the potential for new, state-of-the-art facilities, but they feel like the existing campus is where they’ve grown.
“The students really don’t want to move,” she said in a phone interview. “All of my kids feel like it’s not just school. It’s their second home.”
Both McMullins said they’d prefer for some upgrades to be made at the existing campus, rather than relocate the school.
The Center for Creative Arts has a range of spaces to run a successful fine arts school, including dance studios, an auditorium, a piano lab, a black box theater and a recording studio that opened this fall, said Colleen Laliberte, a teaching artist whose husband taught at CCA for more than 30 years.
She’s concerned the Gateway building would not be able to replicate the resources the current campus provides students. While the school having a state-of-the-art facility would be the answer to her wildest dreams, she said, she also thinks the county needs to be realistic and responsible with how it makes that happen.
“CCA is currently functioning at a high level and is ranked No. 9 in the state, so obviously they’re doing something very right with the facilities that they have,” she said by phone. “Why would you take a school that is succeeding and put them as the first focus to relocate them to a brand new building when you have other schools that are in such desperate need?”
School Board Member Ben Connor, D-Chattanooga, whose district includes the Center for Creative Arts, has expressed support for the proposal. But at school board meetings and in interviews over the past few months, he’s also repeatedly said he would only support moving CCA to Gateway if it’s “not just a lateral move but a better move for that school.”
“They deserve to not lose any aspect of what makes CCA great by moving across the river,” he said by phone last month. “I feel that that has comforted parents when I’ve spoken to them about that, and I hope that they know that I stand behind that statement and that is my goal.”
(READ MORE: Updated Hamilton County school facilities plan calls for campus closures and expansion)
Other school board members questioned at December’s meeting why a magnet school, not a traditional zoned school, was at the top of the priority list and raised concerns that the order could lead to the county running out of money before other projects are funded.
In response, Robertson said the Gateway building was his top priority because it affects the greatest number of students in the county. He also said he feels confident this first recommendation is doable within the bond issue the Hamilton County Commission has talked about.
Both Laliberte and Gideon Thomas, an alumna whose son now attends the school, said they had a lot of unanswered questions with regards to the proposal, including what state-of-the-art means and how the new school would work.
“It’s a lot that is: I don’t know yet,” Thomas said in a phone interview. “Without complete information, what you’re doing is asking people to trust that it’s going to turn out well.”
She emphasized that the voices of those who will be affected by the plan every day, especially staff and administrators, should be elevated throughout the process of deciding the future of CCA.
The school board will host a facilities committee meeting at 4 p.m. Thursday at 3074 Hickory Valley Road and is expected to vote on its final facilities priorities Jan. 18.
Contact Shannon Coan at scoan@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6396.
Staff photo by C.B. Schmelter / Costumes are stored at Chattanooga Center for Creative Arts in 2019.