Martin Luther King Jr.’s former elementary school would become Atlanta’s newest middle school — serving students feeding into Grady High School — in a plan Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Meria Carstarphen presented Thursday.
Carstarphen is proposing a series of projects totaling more than $90 million to relieve crowding in schools in the Grady area: Turning the closed Howard School that King once attended into a middle school, adding classrooms and office space to Grady High School, converting Inman Middle School into an elementary school and building new sports practice fields on the former Walden Middle School campus.
While dozens of schools elsewhere in Atlanta are less than half full, many Grady-cluster schools are over capacity and have crammed students into every conceivable classroom-like space and used trailers to contain the overflow.
Carstarphen’s proposal is the latest idea in years of debate about how to ease crowding at Inman and other schools. Past proposals to reassign Grady cluster students to under-enrolled schools in other areas died amid intense opposition from parents.
Funding for the projects depends on voter approval of a special purpose local option sales tax, or SPLOST, next year. Carstarphen will recommend the Grady cluster projects be placed toward the top of the list for funding.
“This has been a long time in the making,” Carstarphen told parents Thursday. “I believe other communities will understand why we need to start these projects as early as possible.”
Howard opened in 1924 as a segregated elementary school for African-American students and later became a high school. Martin Luther King Jr. attended Howard when it was an elementary school.
Howard closed in 1976. In recent years, alumni and Old Fourth Ward neighbors have urged APS to renovate and reopen the school.
The next SPLOST could go before voters in the spring, though many elements of the election have yet to be determined.
If voters approve the SPLOST, the slate of Grady projects could be completed by 2023, Carstarphen said.
Kathy Hart’s daughter is a seventh-grader at Inman and will graduate before all the Grady cluster projects would be finished. Still, Hart said Carstarphen’s proposal seems to provide a long-term solution for the area.
“You need to spend the money where people are moving,” she said.
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