Several parents of Harmony School students have pushed back against the Cullman County School Board’s plans to reorganize several of the district’s feeder schools — which would reduce the number of grade levels at Harmony while expanding countywide pre-K options.

The board announced its plan in February to have Harmony students transfer to larger campuses after 5th grade next school year. Harmony currently serves pre-K-8th grade students. The plan included similar actions to be made at Welti Elementary School.

Michelle Phillips, the parent of a Harmony student, addressed the board during its meeting March 13, to express her disapproval about the plan. Phillips said she would prefer the board devote resources to expanding Harmony to a larger high school campus, and provided board members with a letter from a Harmony 5th-grader, whose parents requested he be referred to only as Zane, asking for the same thing.

In the letter, Zane said Harmony students have had the opportunity to develop relationships with their would-be future middle school teachers before entering the classroom. He referred to one teacher in particular who he had interacted with regularly in the school’s drop-off line and who he was looking for to learning from next year.

“Moments like these have helped us to develop relationships with some of the middle school teachers. I would like to say I was looking forward to having him and the other middle school teachers in my future here at Harmony,” Zane wrote.

“Since Harmony School is just a great place with awesome teachers, why would you not add more grades for high school instead of taking them away? Many of the students here would love a high school because a lot of the kids never want to leave thanks to the connections with the teachers and staff here at Harmony,” he continued.

Superintendent Shane Barnette said that he agreed with the Harmony community’s support of the school during a phone call with The Times on Tuesday, April 1. However, he said state enrollment requirements made the notion of a Harmony High School impossible.

Harmony has struggled with enrollment numbers since in first opened in 2007 after the consolidation of the now-closed Jones Chapel and Logan schools under former superintendent Nancy Horton. The CCBOE considered redrawing its district lines to increase the number of students able to attend Harmony in 2018 when enrollment had fallen to around 214 students.

More recent date from the 2023-2024 ALDOE issued school report card showed Harmony had 327 students enrolled at all grade levels. Seventy of those students were enrolled in grades 6-8. The Alabama Department of Education requires a minimum of 250 students for the creation of a new school, Barnette said, and while efforts to increase Harmony’s enrollment numbers during the past several years have been marginally successful, it was nowhere close to meeting the threshold.

“We’ve been going in the right direction. We’ve done a lot of things at Harmony to grow the school. It’s in a better place than it was but they would need to quadruple in size,” Barnette said.

Barnette also said the way the State allocates funding for teachers has left the board with few options to hire teachers for Harmony apart from using locally generated funds.

“For a long time we’ve had to pay for teachers out of our general fund,” Barnette said. “When you look at the school system as a whole you have to consider how much you spend per child to educate them and they are consistently one of the highest schools in our district. That’s certainly not the main reason for this decision but it is something we have to consider.”

Barnette also said many of the district’s schools have had to implement waiting lists to enroll children into preK local pre-K programs. Pre-K programs at Harmony and Welti expanded under the new organizational plan would be available to parents throughout the district, which Barnette believed would not only create better educational opportunities for students but would also allow some parents to either forego expensive child care costs or enter into the local workforce.

“Local industry leaders are constantly telling me that we don’t have enough daycares which causes people to not be able to work. My thought process is that it costs nothing to enroll your kid in pre-K. If they wanted to bring them to preK so that both of those parents could work they could turn that cycle of poverty around. Not only are we educating the kids faster and more efficiently but we’re also giving parents an opportunity to go work if that’s what they choose to do,” Barnette said.

Phillips said she is currently working with other Harmony parents to organize a community meeting to further discuss the district’s plans, but had not finalized a date or a venue as of presstime.