Open House
Editor’s note: This is one in a series of articles marking the 50th Anniversary of Hartselle City Schools.
We are accustomed to our schools opening their doors in the first weeks of the school year. Families are invited to tour classrooms, speak with teachers and learn more about the day-to-day routines of students.
But we don’t really think about taking campus tours in May. The month of May doesn’t scream, “Welcome to school!” This wasn’t so in May 1974. In that year, the Hartselle Schools committee was working with the community to determine if Hartselle should break from Morgan County Schools to form its own school district, and so they were focused on showing citizens the local schools and sharing with them all that was at stake.
This desire to share prompted the school committee members to offer an Open House that was the culminating event in a citywide celebration of the arts called Festival of Art Week.
An article that ran in the Hartselle Enquirer quoted school committee member Dick Stoner who encouraged locals to “see firsthand how their tax dollars [were] being used.” He and fellow members of the Hartselle Schools Committee Elaine Duncan, Barry Halford, Elmo Kerr and Larry Anders were available at the schools to “answer questions related to the city’s involvement in providing quality education for its young people” and to provide information on “funds spent by the city since 1962” on improvements to the campuses.
Today, we are enjoying a beautiful new Crestline Elementary School. In May 1974, they showed off six new classrooms on the original Crestline campus. The then-Hartselle Junior High School campus highlighted its new six-classroom science pod. The then-Hartselle High School wowed visitors with its new field house and its shoebox-shaped “Home Economics and Vocational Agribusiness” building.
The Hartselle Schools Committee and the school boards that have followed have understood that school boards do not move their communities forward with complacency.
Randy Sparkman has served on Hartselle’s Board of Education for 14 years.
“The school board is tasked with meeting students where their learning is while also meeting a community where its concerns and resources are. It’s a balance,” he said.
“We are fortunate that the foundation and traditions of Hartselle City Schools have been built over generations of commitment to academic excellence and access. It continues to inform what we do today.” Barkley Bridge Elementary School opened its campus in August 1995. The F.E. Burleson School on Bethel Road is not the original FEB on College Street. The current Hartselle Intermediate School that serves fifth and sixth grade students was once bursting at the seams housing three grades of students as Hartselle Junior High School. The current Hartselle Junior High School accommodates two grades of students on a campus originally created for four grades of students. And Hartselle High School’s Bethel Road campus is a standout but it is now more than 10 years old.
Hartselle works to maintain its campuses and recycle its resources for as many years as it can balance that with meeting students’ needs. When those are not being met, the School Board must again evaluate what it has against what students need and what the community can afford to offer.
“Of course there are occasionally tensions in school decisionmaking, but those tensions can be opportunities to serve students so long as we are all bound by the shared north star of getting as many learning opportunities in front of as many kids as we can,”,” Sparkman continued.
I think Dick Stoner would have been pleased.
