Promoting a Proper Environment for Public School Students

By James Bruce Stanley

This position paper discusses the importance of establishing a familiar, hostile free environment in which the Davidson County public school students may learn and which will promote greater parental interaction within the school system.

Prior to the adoption of this plan, there were numerous school facilities which were lacking proper maintenance or outdated. Two of the most prominent in the Davison County school system were Hickman Elementary and the abandoned Donelson High School. Upon my election in 1995, I immediately began researching the history of the Hickman situation. The evidence I was able to obtain painted Hickman as an aged facility with an enrollment that far exceeded what the facility at Ironwood could handle. As a result, the Hickman Elementary student body was divided into two separate facilities approximately five (5) miles apart. These facilities were Hickman at Ironwood housing grades K-2, and the Hickman Annex on Maplecrest housing grades 3-4. There were questions about the safety of the students attending the Ironwood site as it was directly underneath the flight patterns of the Metropolitan International Airport. In addition, questions were raised regarding high Radon levels at the Maplecrest site. With this information in hand, I immediately established a Hickman Parent Advisory Committee which worked with me and the administration of the School, as well as other local elected officials to convince the Board of Education of the need to act upon their decision to construct a unified Hickman Elementary which was made ten years earlier. Our committee was able to locate the site to construct the new Hickman. This site was the old Donelson High School site which consisted of approximately 20 acres and had generally been unused since Donelson's closing in 1987. The Board of Education agreed, and, with the allocation of the necessary capital, the ground was broken for the new Hickman on May 27, 1999.

In the meantime, the Board of Education had been negotiating with the families of the plaintiffs of the original desegregation suits. As a member of the Council's Education Committee, I was kept updated on these negotiations until the final agreement was reached which would request the Federal District Court to remove the federal busing mandate and transfer total administration of the Davidson County public school system back to the local elected officials. It was at this time that the Board of Education requested that the council adopt the new desegregation plan. Among the more notable concessions I was able to obtain was the proper prioritization of the renovation to the old Donelson High School into a Donelson Middle School. This renovation would stabilize the Donelson High site by removing those portions of the school which had been decaying since the school's closing. In addition, Metropolitan Nashville's investment in the Donelson High site through the construction of a new Hickman Elementary School was essential in establishing the Donelson High renovation as a top priority project upon the adoption of the new desegregation plan.

Both the new Hickman Elementary and Donelson Middle Schools are scheduled to open in August of 2000 and will benefit those students zoned for these facilities. Those Donelson students zoned for Hickman Elementary will attend both Hickman and Donelson (grades K-8) and will promote a more active involvement by both the parents and the local community in the school's activities. Also, the Hickman/Donelson situation is mirrored throughout the Metropolitan Nashville public school system and will serve as the instrument to reestblish public enthusiasm for the public school system. The ultimate benefactors of this new attitude in public education will be the students themselves as they will no longer be subjected to overwhelmingly long bus rides into ares of the community in which they have no attachment. As both an elected representative for the Davidson County area and a student teacher, it is my responsibility to see that the projects associated with the new desegregation plan are completed and that the revival of public enthusiasm for the public school system is maintained. Together, elected officials and community members can achieve goals which will benefit the present and future generations of our community.