Building a foundation: Brandon Sparkman remembers early days of Hartselle City Schools
The front page of the May 17, 1979, issue of the Hartselle Enquirer ran the headline “School Officials Pleased: Hartselle Students Log High Scores on Basic Skills Tests.” The article explained that Hartselle’s second, fourth, sixth and eighth grade students took reading, spelling, language and math tests and “ranked well above state and national averages.”The scores of eighth grade students were delineated further: reading, 10.0; math, 10.4; language, 11.3; and spelling, 10.5. The national average in all four categories was 8.5.
Just four years prior, The Hartselle Schools Committee had parted ways with Morgan County Schools in order to form its own Hartselle City School system the driving force behind that change being teacher pay and the academic advantage that could result from competing to hire the best classroom teachers. Upon forming its fledgling system, Hartselle hired Dr. Carlton Smith as its first Superintendent and Dr. Brandon Sparkman to serve as its Assistant Superintendent and instructional leader.
The academic growth outlined in the 1979 article may have come as a surprise to some, but not to Sparkman. He fully expected Hartselle’s students to perform well.
“When I arrived in Hartselle, I was impressed with the teachers’ and principals’ desire to build an outstanding school system,” Sparkman recalled. “Today, teachers regularly break down and analyze student test scores to determine what changes should be made in classroom instruction in order to improve student achievement, but in 1975 that was not happening everywhere.” With Sparkman’s help, it was happening in Hartselle’s schools. Sparkman recalls regular, data-focused meetings with principals and with teachers. “There was concrete buy-in among teachers and school leaders, and the schools took great pride in the work they were doing to better classroom instruction and grow students’ skills.” Sparkman remembers examining Hartselle’s students’ performance on state tests just one year into these improvement efforts and noting that district scores were among the top five in the state. “Students and teachers quickly made strides.” Among the strong relationships he had with employees, he particularly recalls enjoying the company of J.P. Cain who served as the Hartselle Junior High School principal at the time, and William Booth who was teaching math to students at Hartselle High School. He believed both were committed to bettering the lives of students.
Sparkman was not new to bettering school experiences for all by developing and implementing sweeping plans aimed at transitioning and improving school systems. He had served as superintendent in a Mississippi school district that was moving from segregated to integrated schools. He was then hired as superintendent in a Columbia, South Carolina school district to do the same. Dr. Carlton Smith worked with him in both of those school systems.
When Hartselle hired Smith as its superintendent, Sparkman continued the working relationship and joined Smith in the assistant superintendent role. “I have such good memories of the Hartselle community, and the solid people committed to students and schools,”he said.
Hartselle City Schools benefited from Sparkman’s knowledge for only a few years before Guntersville City Schools hired him to serve as their superintendent, but the lessons in examining data to improve student learning continued to inform teacher practices. Half a century later, those lessons remain a part of Hartselle’s academic culture.
A special thank you to Dr. Sparkman’s first Hartselle secretary Lucy Slater and his son Dr. Robert Sparkman for facilitating the writing of this article.
