By Paul Gattis
Ground zero for Huntsville’s booming population growth can be found on a quiet roadway with little traffic in the south end of the city.
It’s here that the city’s largest high school, built for $75 million and opened just four years ago, has already outgrown itself. Four portable classrooms sit outside Grissom High School’s freshman academy to, in theory, accommodate the overflow.
Meanwhile, across the street, one of the largest real estate development projects in the city’s history is underway. At Hays Farm, plans call for 440 single-family homes to be built and construction is already well underway. The same goes for The Liam at Hays Farm, which will feature 329 units in the luxury apartment complex.
It’s a conflict distilled into a convenient description of “growing pains” for Huntsville, which last year became Alabama’s most populous city. In reality, though, it appears to be the early stages of an accelerated overcrowding problem with a grim future until millions of dollars can be thrown at the problem as a cure.
It’s 2022 and this is Huntsville’s ground zero for growth: A four-year-old school already without enough space for its student body of almost 2,000 students with potentially dozens of more students literally setting up camp adjacent to Grissom’s campus at 1001 Haysland Road.
“That’s the challenge,” said Elisa Ferrell, a member of the Huntsville school board whose district includes Grissom High School. “We have so many kids that we need four portables right now. I don’t know what it’s going to look like when Hays Farm is fully built out.”
The problem with portables
Gloomy as that situation seems, for the moment it’s actually even worse. Grissom and four other overcrowded Huntsville schools have had portable classrooms on campus since the fall but they cannot be occupied. The state department of education must sign off on any portable classrooms and that approval has not yet been received.
Ferrell said she has heard that the portables may be cleared for occupation sometime next month but that target date is uncertain.
“We have classes happening in the library, classes happening in the field house, classes happening in the lunchroom,” she said. “(Principal Jeanne Greer) is squeezing them in wherever there’s space.”
The school system did not make any officials available to speak about the overcrowding at Grissom despite repeated requests by AL.com. A request this week to speak to Superintendent Christie Finley received no response.
The other schools with portable classrooms are Whitesburg Elementary/Middle School, Morris Elementary/Middle School, Goldsmith-Schiffman Elementary School and Hampton Cove Elementary/Middle School. Altogether, the school system has installed 13 portable classrooms at the five schools at a cost of $1.137 million.
For Grissom – named for Apollo astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom, who died in a launchpad fire in 1967 — it wasn’t supposed to be this way. It left its original campus on Bailey Cove Road in 2017 for a facility considered a gem within the school system. About 1,000 people attended the formal ribbon cutting at the school’s gym in June 2017 on the new Haysland Road. U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, a Grissom alum, and Mayor Tommy Battle were among the VIPs in attendance. The campus covers 65 acres and the school has 350,000 square feet of space. At the time, officials said the school could handle about 1,800 to 1,900 students.
In just its fourth year, Grissom has already eclipsed that capacity with an enrollment of about 1,960 students, according to Huntsville City Schools. That’s an increase of about 130 students over the 2020-2021 academic year and more than 200 students from when the school first opened.
The city’s school system has been considered an asset in Huntsville’s growth and prosperity. The FBI and U.S. Space Command have sited the quality of school systems in Huntsville and neighboring areas as reasons for making major investments at Redstone Arsenal.
Even this week, speaking to about 750 business and community leaders at a luncheon in Huntsville, U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville said the Huntsville-area school systems were a critical factor in the Air Force identifying Redstone Arsenal as the “preferred” site for Space Command’s headquarters.
“People aren’t going to move to where they can’t educate their kids,” Tuberville said. “So I thought that was a feather in everybody’s hat that lives in this area.”
Functionality at Grissom with the portables unavailable includes some teachers – who don’t have a designated classroom – essentially hauling their materials from one vacant classroom to another throughout the day. If a teacher has an empty classroom for a planning period, a teacher without a classroom may move in for that period to hold class.
Brenda West is president of the Grissom PTSA and has a son who is a student at Grissom. His Spanish class is one of those without a permanent location to meet.
“(His teacher) just has to go into a classroom where a teacher has a planning period and utilize that, which is not ideal for anybody,” West said. “So, yeah, there is definitely not enough space.”
It’s a hardship not only on the teacher without a classroom, Ferrell said, but also for the teacher who must leave their classroom during a planning period.
“They’re rotating so they can make the maximum use of the facility,” she said. “But then that’s hard on the teacher whose classroom that is. Because when you’re planning, you’d like to sit at your own desk. And you can’t do that because you’ve got to pass it on to somebody else.”
For parents, the space concerns at Grissom are an ongoing conversation, West said. Both she and Ferrell praised the job Greer is doing as principal but at the end of the day, there is still not enough space to go around.
“Just that space is an issue,” West said of conversations she has with other parents. “And class sizes – we all want smaller class sizes. And who wants ugly portables out in front of a new school?”
West said the Grissom PTSA met with Ferrell recently to discuss the overcrowding. Among the questions the school board member heard was about expanding the school.
Ferrell said this week that Grissom was indeed built for expansion. Each of the three wings of the school can add eight classrooms.
“That was that was done in anticipation of potential growth, but I don’t know that it’s going to be enough,” she said.
But that doesn’t account for the lunchroom, which Ferrell and West both said was already too small for the school.
The matter of money
There is also the matter of money to pay for the expansion.
“There’s just not enough capital funds to cover all the needs that we have,” Ferrell said. “So I don’t know how soon the school system will be able to address that other than more portables.”
Battle, the Huntsville mayor, said the school system should continue to see an infusion of cash from the mega developments of Mazda Toyota Manufacturing and Facebook. Mazda Toyota has invested about $2.3 billion at its plant in Limestone County while Facebook, now known as Meta, has invested more than $3 billion in its north Huntsville data center campus.
And while Huntsville gave Mazda Toyota tax abatements as an incentive to come to Huntsville, those abatements did not include taxes for schools.
“One of the reasons that we’ve been bringing in industry and bringing in a number of industries right now that bring money to the table is the capital investment that they’re putting in the community,” Battle said.
A $1 billion investment, Battle said, results in $5 million annually in property taxes for schools. So for Meta’s $3 billion investment, the mayor said that’s $15 million.
“The growth that we’re seeing and for everything from Facebook to Mazda Toyota to Aerojet Rocketdyne to Blue Origin, all those were adding to the coffers of the school system and given us enough money to be able to expand that school system as necessary,” Battle said.
The demands on the school system finances, Ferrell said, are impactful.
“Hampton Cove just recently had a roof replacement and that sounds like that’s something that’s innocuous,” she said. “But that’s millions of dollars.”
According to the capital projects plan on the school system’s website for 2020-2021, there is also a roof replacement and HVAC replacement for Highlands Elementary School. Athletic facility upgrades are on the list for Columbia and Jemison high schools. Aging HVAC systems at other schools across the system are in need of replacement as well, Ferrell said.
Ferrell also said that the Academy for Academics and Arts Elementary magnet school, housed in the former Ed White Middle School, needs to be replaced as well as Chapman and Mountain Gap elementary schools.
“I know the schools in my zone the best but everybody needs some love,” she said.
And as the city grows, the strain on budgets becomes more acute, Ferrell said. Housing construction is booming in south Huntsville near Grissom and Huntsville’s growth has shown no indication of slowing.
“I just don’t know how, given the tightness of funds, and as the city grows, we get more students,” she said. “And as we get more students, we have to hire more custodians and more bus drivers and teachers. So that takes up the money from that situation. And I just don’t know when there will be enough funding available to add on to the buildings.”
West, the PTSA president, said another concern for parents is students being “crammed in there” during a pandemic.
“Me personally, my thought when they went back to school this year, I thought, ‘Well, they’re not going to be six feet apart,’” West said. “They’re not even going to be three feet apart. There are desks everywhere to get them in the classroom.
“The biggest concern is here we have this beautiful school, we’ve got all these houses at Hays Farm in addition to other neighborhoods and what’s being done to help our student population not be so crowded?”
And when it comes to priorities, West said, “We want to be on the list a little higher up because it’s a problem.”
Ferrell acknowledged that the situation at Grissom “does make me nervous.” But she added that the anxiety goes beyond putting students in a school that’s over capacity.
There is also the shortfall of teachers and the declining number of potential new hires coming out of colleges these days. And there is the pandemic fatigue and then the strain of overcrowding is putting on teachers.
“We have demanded a lot of our teachers and it’s taking a toll,” Ferrell said. “So instead of having 26 kids, you have 35 (because of overcrowding). And you’re already completely worn out from what the pandemic has done to you.
“It’s tough. It’s really tough. So yes, I am worried.”