A former insurance company office vacated as more employees are shifted to work from home could be converted into Hamilton County's newest elementary school under a plan the board of education will consider this week.
The county is proposing to buy the former Cigna Corp. office on Goodwin Road across from East Brainerd Elementary School for a new school site to serve the growing East Brainerd area.
Tucker McClendon, chair of the Hamilton County school board, said buying and renovating the 98,562-square-foot facility could provide a school for 700 to 800 students at only about half the cost of building a new school from the ground up.
"We have a billion dollars of school facility needs right now, and we don't have that kind of money available so we have to look for innovative ways to tackle our capital needs," McClendon said in a telephone interview Monday. "We know we're going to need another elementary school in the growing eastern part of the county in the next five to 10 years, and this allows us to do a new school at a much lower cost."
McClendon urged school officials, including then-Superintendent Bryan Johnson, to tour the Cigna facilities last year to consider ways to re-purpose the facility for a school. McClendon estimates the building could be bought and renovated for school use at a cost of about $15 million to $16 million, which he said is about half the cost for building most of the county's new schools.
Empire Communities, one of North America's largest privately-owned homebuilding companies, has contracted to buy the entire 95-acre parcel being sold by Cigna at 7555 Goodwin Road, and the county is considering buying about 20 acres of the site, including the single-story office building that was used until last year as a health insurance claims processing and sales operation for more than three decades.
"Empire has expressed interest in selling the existing building along with the surrounding 20 to 23 acres around the building," Hamilton County Deputy Superintendent Donia Stewart said in a memo to the school board. "In conversations with the county mayor, there is interest for county government to purchase the building and surrounding property for the purposes of a future school site for Hamilton County Schools."
The school system would be responsible for renovating the existing building for a new school, Stewart said. The property includes 700 parking spaces around the building, which has 26 private offices, 10 conference rooms and an employee cafeteria with a full kitchen and seating for about 200 people.
"Funding would come from the fund balance for future capital improvement funds over the next two fiscal years," said Stewart, who estimates the renovation would cost from $7 million to $10 million to develop the office into a school site.
The school board will consider the request at its meeting on Thursday night.
The Hamilton County Commission must still decide on any property purchase, and no price has yet been released for the site. Sabrena Smedley, commission chair, said renovating the Cigna building could provide needed school facilities in a growing part of the county at a better price than trying to build a new school. But Smedley said it's still early in the process of considering the plan.
"I'm very interested in the possibility, but it's all going to depend upon how much we are going to have to pay for it and how much it is going to cost to renovate this property," she said.
The plan to convert the commercial building into a new school is similar to a proposal the school board considered in 2020 to relocate the Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts into the abandoned Sears and J.C. Penney stores at Northgate Mall, which the school system considered buying for $8.9 million. Ultimately, the county rejected the plan and decided instead to renovate and expand a former elementary school in Lakesite to replace the aging school on East Brainerd Road.
The newest building site the county is considering buying is across Goodwin Road from East Brainerd Elementary School, which opened in 2015 on the site of the former David Brainerd Christian School. Even before the new two-story elementary school opened with a capacity of 1,100 students, then-school Superintendent Rick Smith said another school was needed in the area to meet the enrollment growth.
While Hamilton County Schools need more space, Cigna Corp. does not.
The health insurance company put the 95-acre site up for sale last July after shifting most of the 450 employees who once worked in the suburban office building to work from home.
"COVID has changed the way our teams work and collaborate - and our teams have not only adjusted but flourished in this environment, " company spokesperson Courtney Nogas said last year.
At 7555 Goodwin Road just behind the Walmart center, the structure was originally built in 1990 to house the health care management business of Provident Life & Accident Insurance Co., which is now Unum Corp. In 1994, Provident sold its health care management business for $310 million to Healthsource Inc., of Concord, New Hampshire, and three years later, Cigna acquired Healthsource for $1.7 billion.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6340. Follow him on Twitter @dflessner1.