RUTHERFORD COUNTY, Tenn. (WKRN) — Rutherford County School district leaders plan to request funding to build a new middle school and a new high school to help accommodate the community’s rapid growth.
Data from UT Knoxville shows Rutherford County is growing nearly two times faster than the state of Tennessee as a whole, and schools are one sector seeing the impact first-hand.
“(We’re) a huge county school system, top 100 enrollment for the entire country, but we also try to keep it small,” said RCS Director Dr. Jimmy Sullivan. “I start the year off by going to every school and talking to every faculty about what our expectations are.”
One of the new trends for Rutherford County Schools is how increased housing costs leading to more growth at the district’s middle and high schools.
“When you have families that are have younger kids, usually you have families that are just starting out, and as housing prices increase, you have more established families who are moving into the area,” said Dr. Sullivan. “As housing prices have increased, we’re not seeing as much growth at the elementary school. We’re seeing more in the middle and high school, which is a different trend.”
He said the district’s growth was steady this year but high school growth has been about 3%. And for a district their size that means hundreds more students.
“We’re seeing more of that growth in the high school level, which is a challenge because that is some of your higher cost programming at the high school level,” said Dr. Sullivan. “The growth continues to just be a little bit of all of everywhere at the high school level, which is why we have the additions going on at every part of the county.”
It’s all to relieve overcrowding district-wide. The new Poplar Hill Elementary set to open this fall is the possible site of a middle school on the same property to relieve overcrowding at two of the biggest middle schools in the state. Dr. Sullivan said they’re bringing that request to the county in about April or May. Blackman middle has over 1700 students. Rockvale Middle has over 1,600.
They’re making additions to multiple high schools, including Smyrna high which had its expansion open in January. Oakland and Riverdale high schools will open in the summer and La Vergne High School will hopefully open in about a year and a half.
Dr. Sullivan said they plan to ask for a new high school within the next six to nine months to serve the area near Stewarts Creek High School. They hope to purchase the land in the next six to eight weeks because there isn’t enough land on the Poplar Hill elementary property.
“Probably right across the street from Stewarts Creek High School, literally,” said Dr. Sullivan. “Can’t find a hundred acres anywhere else.”
In addition to the building projects, a significant rezoning plan helped alleviate overcrowding on some campuses as well.
“Anytime you rezone, it’s growing pains, and this one was the first time that I know of that we’ve ever done K-12. I’m from this community. I don’t know that we’ve ever done K-12. It is definitely not how I would have envisioned it going as far as the final final product. But we are through it. I think there were some gives and takes around all aspects of it, but we’re through it. And moving forward,” he said. “We had to move high school students around because we had three high school additions. And we had to move elementary school students to be able to offset Poplar Hill.”
