Hoover school board offers to buy Riverchase Middle School from Pelham

The Hoover school board tonight voted to make an offer to buy Riverchase Middle School from Pelham City Schools for $4.25 million.

Pelham has been using the campus as its middle school but built a new middle school and no longer needs the Riverchase campus.

The Pelham Board of Education in February 2015 voted to sell the 41-acre Riverchase campus to Shades Mountain Christian School, but that deal for some reason fell through, Hoover schools Superintendent Katby Murphy said.

The Hoover school board's vote to make the offer came after a closed-door executive session that lasted more than an hour. State law allows public bodies to meet in executive session to discuss potential real estate transactions, among other things.

Hoover has not made a decision on how it would use the Riverchase Middle School campus and 93,700-square-foot building, but one idea being strongly considered is to use the site for skilled trades or other specialty academies now offered at Hoover and Spain Park high schools, Murphy said.

Potentially, students could go to that site for specialty classes related to skilled trades and/or math and English courses related to those job skills for part of the school day and go to their base school campus for other classes the rest of the school day, Murphy said.

“We understand the importance of preparing our students who are going to college but also preparing our students who may not go to college and making sure they have skill sets and opportunities for a successful career,” Murphy said.

However, that is only one idea on the table, she said.

“We are certainly looking forward to going to our community and hearing about how we might use that facility, getting our faculty and staff involved in that conversation, along with our board — all of our stakeholders,” Murphy said.

She plans to get with Pelham’s school superintendent so he can take Hoover’s offer to the Pelham Board of Education for consideration, and hopefully the contract can be signed soon, Murphy said. “We’re anxious to make this happen,” she said.

If the Pelham Board of Education accepts Hoover’s offer, Hoover does not plan to use the facility for the 2017-18 school year but will take time to figure out the best use and prepare the building for the following school year, Murphy said. It also would have to be de-annexed from Pelham and annexed into Hoover, she said.