Students from Gainesville City and Hall County schools may not be ready for their winter break to end, but educators from both schools are excited to welcome students for the next calendar year.
For both school districts, 2022 was a year that brought many changes. From finishing up major SPLOST construction projects to implementing more robust safety features, both Gainesville City and Hall County schools will have new features ready for students once classes begin on Jan. 4.
Hall County Schools continued to roll out its 10-year facility plan, which was originally approved in 2019. This $326 million facility plan will upgrade several Hall County high schools, will see the construction of new elementary schools to replace aging facilities and will improve fine arts spaces across multiple high schools.
“In spite of COVID, in spite of record inflation – which has increased our cost of building new space by anywhere between 35 and 50% – we still have made a commitment to this community to continue to update fine art space,” Hall County Schools Superintendent Will Schofield said.
According to Schofield, the $35 million East Hall High School overhaul is almost complete. Students will get to enjoy upgraded features and Schofield estimates that 60% of its instructional spaces will be brand new.
Over on the other side of the county, West Hall High School will have a new Fine Arts wing, which will have a theater stage for the performing arts and a new band/music room.
Next, Hall County Schools will move its focus on the elementary schools.
“We've got so much space in Hall County, which is made up of small schools that are 50, 60, 70-years old,” Schofield said. “Consolidating and phasing out some of those old schools and continuing to build new, larger, more efficient schools – for instance, the first one which is already under construction, Sandra Dunnigan Deal Elementary. We continue to work on replacement number two, which will replace McEver and Oakwood and combine those two school districts.”
Meanwhile, Gainesville City Schools have been working in the opposite direction in terms of school improvements. The city school system has focused on elementary school improvements for the past 20 years, and now it is time to move on to secondary schools and auxiliary improvements at facilities like the Bobby Gruhn Field at City Park and the Ivye Watson baseball field.
“We will see the final building on Gainesville High School campus open,” Gainesville City Schools Superintendent Jeremy Williams said. “[With] the final three-story additional building – which is another instructional building – we will be able to no longer use the ninth-grade center and we’ll be no longer using three different modulars that are on the high school campus. So we get to open one building and close four. And that will complete the improvements there at 830 Century Place at Gainesville High School.”
Gainesville City Schools opened $75 million worth of facilities this year, with a total of 300,000 square feet. Gainesville High School’s cafeteria and media center received improvements, while the city’s middle schoolers were given another option with the opening of Gainesville Middle School West.
“Then for our middle school students, [it was] just a new opportunity to split the middle school,” Williams said. “Now, Gainesville Middle School for a number of years was pretty large. We would have as many as 1,800 kids in one middle school. And our work began about four years ago. The SPLOST referendum and bond referendum passed, and one of the goals in that was to give our middle school students a second option. And so both of those middle schools just kind of relieved that middle school stress that kids typically have, but also parents. It's been a great school year, and those facilities were just a big part of the success we had over this 2022 school year.”
Even though it is a new addition, Williams said Gainesville Middle School already feels like it is part of the Red Elephant family. Williams was pleased with the ribbon-cutting turnout on July 18.
“A lot of people came up to me being like ‘This already feels like home, this feels like Gainesville City, this feels like, you know, part of us as a district,’” Williams said. “And to me, that's important when you still have one high school where everybody graduates from. You don't want to have kids or families that feel like their school doesn't fit in with the rest of the schools in the district. And we were just very pleased with the input we had a couple of years ago with attendance zones and employees and leadership and all of those different pieces, that it came to fruition. And it's just really felt like it's been a part of our district for a long time.”
Aside from new buildings and building upgrades, Hall County and Gainesville City Schools also had to reconfigure their safety approach following the tragic mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. When Gainesville City School students returned for their Fall 2022 semester, they were met with new faculty.
“There has not been one negative for us implementing the armed security guards,” Williams said. “Now, prior to the security guards, we had five school resource officers – two at the high school, one at each of the middle schools and one that served the elementary schools that were not near the high school or middle school. And when we added the armed security guards, [they], in addition to the SROs, just let our community know that we need another set of eyes.”
According to Williams, the armed guards differ from the school resource officers in the fact that they cannot make arrests. School resource officers, on the other hand, are contracted through the Gainesville Police Department.
“They are the law enforcement, where armed security guards have that expertise but they do not have the privileges that go along with being a sworn officer,” Williams said.
The armed guards display a gun on their hips, and Williams said that he has not received any complaints.
Hall County Schools have not been able to hire armed guards, but the school system has increased its number of school resource officers and drug dogs. School officials are also placing a greater emphasis on mental health.
“I've been doing this for a while now [with] 36 years and 23 as a superintendent, I've never seen more need for just mental health skills and stability than I have,” Schofield said. “We look at reports almost every day and some are suggesting that as chaotic as the world was before COVID, that maybe we've seen anywhere from 150 to 300% increase. And we are experiencing that also. When mom and dad, aunt or uncle, grandmother send their child to our schools, safety is number one. The best thing we can do to keep our kids safe is to continue to provide the mental health support and the skills that they need to somehow make sense of this chaotic world that they're living in.”
Schofield reminded students, staff and the community that most tragedies over the last 30 years could have been prevented with a more proactive approach.
“If you see something, say something, and we'll just continue to do that,” Schofield said. “Otherwise, we'll continue to try to get kids also ready for the jobs that are available in the 21st century.”
Offering a diverse option of different career pathways has been a major focus in Hall County Schools. Although college is seen as the main pathway to success, Hall County administrators want students to know that skill-based jobs can be just as lucrative as having a college degree.
“If you want to be a pediatrician, obviously you need to go to a four-year college and you're going to be taking advanced coursework for a long time, and that's wonderful,” Schofield said. “But the truth of the matter is that individuals with two-year, high-demand skills certificates are earning more money and they have been for the last decade than individuals that have master's degrees in the social sciences. So we need to be awful careful that either consciously or subconsciously, we're not looking down our nose at skills because skills are what are paying the bills this day and age. The individuals who do a lot of our skilled labor in this country are growing older, and there haven't been the number of young people going into those areas that the economy is demanding.”
