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Hoover eyes December 2020 completion date for Berry Middle School addition

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Layout courtesy of Hoover City Schools

Hoover schools Superintendent Kathy Murphy said tonight she would like to open an 18-classroom addition at Berry Middle School by December 2020.

That was a proposed timeline shared by architect Rick Lathan at tonight’s Hoover school board meeting.

Murphy said she’d actually like to open the 24,000-square-foot addition tomorrow due to growth in student enrollment at Berry, but December 2020 or January 2021 likely is the earliest possible opening.

Lathan, who has been working with school officials on early drawings, said the proposal is to build a three-story addition with six classrooms on each floor. The proposed site is on the west side of the school, with the addition sitting slightly back from the front of the school but matching the current exterior in color and architectural design.

Bus pickup and dropoff would be in the front and rear of the school, and carpool traffic would continue at the same location on the eastern side of the school, he said.

The projected cost is $7.5 million, he said.

He proposes that school officials take bids for the construction work in October of this year and award the bid by December. It likely will take a year to build, he said. Construction can take place without impacting school operations, he said.

This will be the second major addition at Berry. The first one came in 2006 — just a year after the school opened in 2005 — after former school officials decided to completely close the former Berry Middle School on Columbiana Road and move the entire school to the new site next to Spain Park High School.

The addition still requires official approval by the school board, but so far no board members have voiced any objections to the idea.

The construction project is one of numerous reasons school officials say they need voters to approve a 2.4-mill increase in property taxes. The Hoover City Council voted unanimously Monday night to ask the Legislature to let the city hold such an election.

ACADEMIC IMPROVEMENT PLANS

In other business tonight, Murphy told school board members she was pleased the school district received an A on its report card given by the state recently. “We’re not walking on water, but we’re very proud of that A and will continue to work hard to maintain that,” she said.

The report card showed school officials they need to work to improve education for students with special needs, particularly students learning English as a second language, she said.

Murphy said she also is interested in exploring ways to expand Hoover’s preschool education program, which currently is offered only to a small number of students at Trace Crossings Elementary School.

Murphy said, in the future, she would like to explore the possibility of creating an Early Learning Center that helps prepare more children for school before they enter kindergarten, particularly those children who otherwise would not have the means to get prepared for kindergarten.

“If they start behind in the very beginning, it’s almost a never-catch-up ordeal for them,” she said.

Some of those preschool programs are grant-based, and some charge tuition, she said. She would like to start applying for some of that grant money, she said.

Murphy also said that, sometime in the next four to six weeks, the U.S. Department of Justice likely will hold a community meeting in Hoover to talk about things it believes the Hoover school district needs to do to get released from federal court supervision related to a decades-old desegregation court case.

The school district has worked with the Justice Department and NAACP Legal Defense Fund to develop a preliminary consent decree that spells out those terms, and that information — still in draft form right now — likely will be shared at that meeting, Murphy said.

The U.S. Department of Justice is leading those discussions, and “that’s a process of conversation and compromise,” she said.

Also tonight, the Hoover school board:

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