SODDY-DAISY — Hamilton County leaders broke ground Wednesday on the renovation and expansion of Soddy Daisy Middle — the first groundbreaking ceremony for a set of school projects officials began planning nearly three years ago.
The project, which will be done in phases to allow the school to continue to operate, is expected to be completed by December 2028. It includes new classrooms, learning spaces and a gymnasium, as well as renovations to the cafeteria and administrative areas.
“It’s not just for the kids at Soddy Daisy Middle. It’s for the whole entire community,” said Rhonda Thurman, who represented Soddy-Daisy on the Hamilton County school board for 20 years. “That’s what we built this school for. We build schools for communities.”
Soddy Daisy Middle served 426 students this year, and the building has the capacity for 531, according to district data from May. Once construction is completed, it will accommodate up to 650 students to allow for future growth in the area.
Hamilton County officials break ground on Soddy Daisy Middle renovation
(READ MORE: Superintendent Justin Robertson presents $705M budget to Hamilton County Commission)
The roughly $35 million project is funded by the $260 million bond the Hamilton County Commission approved for school facilities in 2024. The plan is for that bond issue to pay for five major facilities projects.
It’s been “a long time coming,” Thurman said of Wednesday’s ceremony.
Over the past two decades, as the district considered various school facilities plans, Soddy Daisy Middle repeatedly came up as a school that needed to be either closed or replaced due to its condition, but nothing ever came to fruition.
When Hamilton County officials first presented the latest school facilities plan in August 2023, Soddy Daisy Middle again made the list. At the time, the plan called for the school’s students to be relocated to create a K-12 experience on the shared campus of Daisy Elementary and Soddy Daisy High.
Thurman and community members advocated for the existing building to instead be renovated, and in November 2024, the Hamilton County school board approved updating the middle school.
Where other school projects stand
— Franklin-Roberts Future Ready Center
Future Ready centers serve as centralized hubs where multiple high schools send students to learn skills for career fields. Two career pathways have been announced for this new center — a Volkswagen engineering preparatory program and an entrepreneurship pathway, in partnership with former Chattanooga Mayor and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker.
The center is expected to take up the first two floors of the former BlueCross BlueShield building at West M.L. King Boulevard and Gateway Avenue, and in April, county officials announced plans to build a new business incubator facility on the third and fourth floors. Participating businesses will be required to employ students to receive subsidized rent at the building. The first step in the process is to sell the county-owned Business Development Center in the North Shore area to fund the construction of the new business incubator, a plan which passed the Hamilton County Commission unanimously in early May.
Later that month, the Hamilton County school board approved using a construction manager at risk — a process in which the contractor is involved in design and construction and commits to keeping the project within a guaranteed maximum price — for the project.
— North River Elementary
In August, officials announced the new school serving students from Alpine Crest, DuPont and Rivermont elementaries will partner with the North River Family YMCA to create a community hub. The partnership will turn the DuPont Elementary site and YMCA into one campus, and the two facilities will share a gymnasium.
The school board voted in January to select the Christman Company, a Knoxville-based construction firm, as the construction manager at risk for the school project.
— Brainerd High
In October, the school board approved a contract with Chattanooga-based HK Architects to design a renovation and expansion of Brainerd High. The project creates a combined grade 6-12 campus that serves students from Brainerd High and Dalewood Middle.
Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp shared architectural renderings of the school on social media in April.
— Clifton Hills Elementary
Officials have repeatedly said the planned renovation and/or addition at Clifton Hills Elementary is the most complicated of the school facilities projects. In May, the school board selected MTa Architecture, a Chattanooga-based firm, to conduct a study to determine and verify the final scope and design contract for the project.
In March, Hamilton County Schools awarded a $29 million contract to J & J Contractors, a Chattanooga-based builder, for the renovation project.
“It doesn’t pop like a new park does or a new stadium does or even some of the other school projects. It’s a renovation and an expansion of a good school in a good community, and that matters as much or more than any big shiny object we could go chase,” Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp said. “Great communities are forged by always iterating, always improving every day, and that’s what this is all about.”
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Along with the opening of the new Tyner Middle/High Academy, completing the projects in the school facilities plan will allow the district to reduce the number of buildings rated as poor or unsatisfactory by eight by 2030, according to a press release.
That’s significant, Superintendent Justin Robertson said, and it means a lot to both communities like Soddy-Daisy and the students who will be in the buildings.
Earlier this school year, he said, he attended the funeral for Boodie Fox, a longtime teacher and basketball coach at Soddy Daisy Middle. Seeing what Fox meant to students is why buildings are important, Robertson said.
“It’s not about the bricks,” he said. “It’s not about the way the building looks, although those are important, but what matters is the connections that we’re making with kids and what the building actually facilitates in terms of building community within Soddy-Daisy, within the Soddy Daisy Middle School community … so that 60 years from now, it’s our grandkids that are sitting here having a similar conversation about what happened in this building.”
Contact education reporter Shannon Coan at scoan@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6396.