SCS makeover
10-year-plan on district agenda
By the end of April, Shelby County Schools will unveil a long-term, 10-year strategic plan for its aging facilities.
It will be the first time that the current district administration has revealed such a plan.
The plan, called “Reimagine 901,” will determine renovations to existing buildings and plans for new buildings, meaning some school buildings will close and consolidate. District officials say the plan will also include related academic strategy.
At an unveiling of the new Alcy Elementary School on Wednesday, Joris Ray, district superintendent, said the school was just the start.
“This is truly what Reimagining 901 is about,” Ray said, praising the “unique” school as the “epitome of a community school” that would not have been possible without community support.
“But please note,” he added. “This is only the beginning.”
The district will begin announcing the plan on April 16, during a state of the district address. It will be presented in more detail to the school board, and
then the county commission, the following week.
‘Reimagine’ plan follows other contentious consolidation plans
Initially, the district had planned to share the long-term plan with the county last spring, and then later in the summer, but never did. It will build off of a “footprint” consolidation plan left by former Superintendent Dorsey Hopson in the final weeks of his tenure. Hopson’s consolidation plan called for 28 school
closures, 10 new buildings and additions to five buildings, an effort to address hundreds of millions in deferred maintenance projects and thousands of open seats for students.
The old plan included the new Alcy and Parkway Village schools, which were, at that point, ongoing projects that had been singularly approved and had been included in earlier district consolidation proposals. Now, SCS touts the pair, built for a collective $55 million, as the
district’s only “21st Century” schools, filled with LED lighting, natural light and “nontraditional” learning spaces for kids, outdoors and in the hallways. Both are also outfitted with updated technology.
“What the footprint plan was, that was a plan of brick and mortar,” Ray said of the inherited consolidation plan. “This is the plan that brings everything together; our academic strategic plan, as well as our facilities into one Reimagine 901 plan.”
The district said it is aware of the work ahead of them sharing the plan with communities, and garnering their support. For example, before Hopson proposed the consolidation plan, he moved to close Dunbar Elementary School. The school remained open, undoubtedly due to actions from the community; Joyce Dorse-coleman, board member for that district, was elected to her seat after leading many of the community efforts to keep the school open. By December 2018, it was back on Hopson’s list of schools that would close and consolidate.
In the months ahead of the pandemic, SCS held meetings with various community groups, Ray said. He said the administration plans to continue gathering feedback, including from principals and teachers who know the schools.
“We try to eliminate any unintended consequences, but some things happen, and you have ‘aha moments’ later,” Ray said. “So we try to, on the front end, mitigate all of those risks.”
Four years before the new Parkway Village Elementary school opened, parents spoke out against the closure of one of the schools that fed into the new build. At the new Alcy unveiling, board member Miska Clay Bibbs, who represents the district, explained having the difficult conversation about the school closures with her father. Her dad, she explained, attended Magnolia Elementary, which was closed and consolidated for new Alcy.
She drove him past the lot for the new school, and said his thoughts about the closure improved.
“A lot of times people hold on to the memory of the building, versus understanding your memory is your memory,” Bibbs said. “But we’re also trying to create a future for our county.”
She explained the plan, which she also anticipates to see in the coming weeks, as a way to “improve learning conditions through strategic consolidation.” The building, she explained, is the tangible result of improved learning and community investment, she said.
“It also pushes the thinking around what our kids deserve,” she said.
Plan should address issues of equity, district finance
County Commissioner Michael Whaley, a former teacher who is vice chair of the county’s education committee, expects the plan to address equity and financial issues for SCS.
Students should be able to go to a safe, secure school building in a quality public school facility with quality instruction, he said. And from a financial standpoint, “it just makes more sense to invest in fewer, better quality facilities, given the fact that many buildings are underutilized, significantly underutilized, but still have the same costs as any other building would,” he said.
Having a 10-year plan, which breaks projects down by priority and funding source — whether
that be county, federal, or other funds — can also help the county plan on a 5-year outlook, he said, since education makes up the largest portion of the county’s CIP funding. It’s better to have a plan that may change, than to not have one, he said.
When the Reimagine 901 plan is presented, he would like to know how what the district has learned about its families, teachers and students during the pandemic has been factored in.
“There’s a lot that we’ve learned over the last year” Whaley said. “...it doesn’t require a total about-face (of the plan), because there are certain fundamentals that are still there, but I think it’ll help inform it, to make it even more relevant, and to make it such that should we encounter something like this again, from a school perspective, we’d be better prepared to handle it.”
SCS has received hundreds of millions in federal relief funding during the pandemic, and while the dollars come with stipulations, some of the funding can be used for ventilation improvements to HVAC systems, and could potentially be used to free up dollars in other areas of the budget. So far, the district has not yet released a plan for its third and by far heftiest stimulus of $503 million, the equivalent of nearly half of the district’s annual operating budget.
“What COVID has done is kind of brought the community along, and it has really accelerated and highlighted some of the issues that’s going on right here in
Shelby County Schools and just sort of education across the nation,” Ray said. “One thing I do know, teachers are more valued and appreciated, and they should be compensated.”
Ray didn’t specifically say what kind of changes the plan may include for teachers — who have “the most noble profession” — but said he supports sustainable increases to their salaries. That issue has been contentious, both between the state and the district — which claims it is not adequately funded to carry out the level of teacher raises promised at the state level — as well as between unions and the district. The pandemic slowed down a year’s worth of collaborative conferencing efforts to bring forth a salary schedule, which the two unions say is necessary to compete with surrounding districts and schools and retain veteran teachers and teachers with advanced degrees in particular.
“We’re just trying to figure out what we can do to ensure that our teachers are properly compensated. And that is sustainable,” Ray said, adding that he thinks that for teachers, “the minimum salary should be 100,000 a year.”
The teachers and administrators will be key to successfully merging any schools, Ray acknowledged. Merging schools can be an emotional experience, both for the students and for the families that may recognize a school as a community pillar. And the change demands a lot from school administrators, too, who are tasked with blending cultures and climates of the other schools, he said.
“This is our one moment in time. I think we have to seize the moment,” Ray said. “And understand that education as we once knew it is no longer. And we have to do things a different kind of way.”