City schools reveal plans for facility upgrades

Published 8:56 pm Tuesday, April 20, 2021

With a new superintendent at the helm, the Cullman City School Board is looking to the future with plans for new school facilities and an adjustment in the grade configuration on school campuses.

In his first meeting as the head of the system since he began working on April 1, Cullman City Schools Superintendent Kyle Kallhoff presented a few proposals that the school board has been developing to better prepare for student growth and improve the safety at the city’s schools.

He said the $40 million plan would be a three to four year process that would begin with addressing the needs of Cullman Middle School and Cullman City Primary School.

At Cullman Middle School, a new building would be constructed that includes 16-18 new classrooms, a new library, an agriscience area, a performing arts area and administrative offices. That construction would also include removing the round building and the ag/FACS building from campus, Kallhoff said.

At Cullman City Primary School, the plan is to add a 12-classroom wing, a multipurpose building and a new cafeteria to that campus, he said.

He said additional plans for the campus also include repurposing the current cafeteria to at least four additional classrooms, and eventually moving the library to where the current primary school gym is located, which would also open up more classroom space.

Kallhoff said another major aspect of the plan for improving the safety of students and staff on the primary school’s campus is to add a second entrance and exit from the school onto Oak Street to lighten the load of the school’s current lone entrance and exit onto Stadium Drive.

That entrance gets backed up every day as parents are bringing students or picking them up, and that could be disastrous in the event of an emergency at the school, he said.

“If something were to happen at 2:30 or 3, it’s going to be bad,” he said. “So that’s the safety part that has got to be addressed.”

As part of the plan to build new facilities on most of the city’s campuses, those schools’ grade configurations would also change. In the new plan, the primary school would hold Pre-K through second grade and the two elementary schools would have students from third grade through fifth grade. Sixth graders would return to the middle school. Sixth graders previously occupied the round building. Cullman High School would remain unchanged at ninth through twelfth grades.

Kallhoff said the grade changes would not be immediate, but would take place over the next several years as the schools’ new buildings are built. The plan would have Cullman City Primary School begin to include second graders in 2023 and Cullman Middle School to take on sixth graders in 2025, he said.

One of the driving factors behind the plan is overcrowding at East Elementary and West Elementary, so moving second and sixth grades to other campuses would lighten the load that both of those schools are seeing, he said.

The plan also includes new multipurpose buildings on both elementary school campuses that would be used as student and parent gathering places, Kallhoff said.

Athletic upgrades at Cullman High School are also included in the plan, with synthetic turf installed at the softball field, replacing the bleachers in the high school gym, addressing the tennis complex’s restrooms and working with the quarterback club to replace the football field’s scoreboard, he said.

Currently, the school system can secure enough money on its own to pay for most of the projects itself, but there is still around $15 million in funding that will need to be found, Kallhoff said.

He said the system will most likely not be able to use any of the federal funds that are coming from the American Rescue Plan Act on the new construction, but he, the board’s members and Chief School Finance Officer James Brumley will continue to look for sources of revenue that can help pay for the new school facilities — including asking for help from the Cullman City Council.

Kallhoff said the system’s capital plan will also need to be adjusted to align with the system’s current needs and resources, and he has begun meeting with the capital planning committees to get that process started.

“From that point, we’ll try to find the resources and begin the process of selecting architects and meeting with school groups to draft the best designs for each campus that are also within our budget,” he said.