Riverchase Career Center won't open until August 2019

The Hoover school system will not open its new Riverchase Career Center until August 2019, Superintendent Kathy Murphy announced recently.

School officials had hoped to open the career center, formerly home to Pelham’s Riverchase Middle School, in August 2018 and have been working diligently to accomplish that, but the time frame is just too tight, Murphy said during her state-of-the-school-system address last week.

The state will have to approve renovation plans for the building in order for work to proceed, and she’s not sure how long that will take, she said. She’s disappointed, but the delay will allow students and parents to better see the kind of center school officials intend to create before students are asked whether they want to go there, she said.

It also will give school officials more time to talk to students about what career instruction they want and more time to identify and hire the best staff, Murphy said.

As of now, there are five programs Hoover school officials intend to offer in August 2019, Murphy said. Those are building and construction trades (carpentry, electrical, and heating and air conditioning), welding, culinary and hospitality, computer science and fire science (firefighter preparation), she said.

Partners working with the school system to launch those programs include the Alabama Associated General Contractors, Jefferson State Community College, the city of Hoover, Leadership Hoover and Hoover City Schools Foundation, Murphy said.

A growing number of students in Hoover have no plans to attend college, but they need skill sets to help them find well-paying jobs, Murphy said. The percentage of Hoover and Spain Park high school students who don’t plan to attend college has increased from 5.4 percent in the 2014-15 school year to 11.1 percent in the 2015-16 school year and 13.2 percent in the 2016-17 school year, Murphy said.

Also, many students go to college but end up dropping out, she said. School officials want to make sure those students have skill sets to help them succeed as well, she said. And the career center also can be helpful in providing skills for students who stay and finish college, she said.

Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood is working on architectural plans for renovation of the center, and money for construction and startup should come from a $9.1 million contribution from Jefferson County, Murphy said.

The superintendent said that while she is sad the career center won’t open in 2018, she’s also a little relieved.

“Rezoning is big this year, and biting off rezoning and opening the career center was going to be a huge challenge for me and my staff and all of our personnel in the district,” she said.

The redrawing of attendance zones, which was approved by a federal judge on Dec. 14, goes into effect for the 2018-19 school year, so school officials have much work to do to make that happen logistically.

For example, staffing must be shifted to accommodate changing student populations, bus routes must be redrawn, and physical changes must be made to some campuses to accommodate different age groups.

Murphy said the school district also will continue working to get released from a decades-old federal desegregation court case by proving the district has taken steps to provide an equal education for students of all races.

To do that, the district must work to bring the racial makeup of faculty and staff at various schools more in line with the racial makeup of the student bodies and provide evidence to the court that students of all races are being treated equitably concerning discipline, course offerings, extracurricular activities, transportation and the quality of school buildings.

The U.S. Department of Justice was visiting Hoover schools again this month and having conversations with principals and other school officials, Murphy said.

In addition to those major tasks, Murphy said she needs to begin focusing more attention on the academic growth of the school district, mentoring and coaching other leaders in the system and providing instructional support to teachers.

Student achievement

In her hourlong state-of-the-school-system address, she recounted a slew of statistics regarding student achievement.

While students from Hoover City Schools substantially exceed state averages on college readiness tests, scores from the Class of 2017 were down slightly from 2015, Murphy said.

Seventy-six percent of students in the Class of 2017 from Hoover City Schools were deemed ready for college-level English, down from 77 percent in 2015. Fifty-five percent of the Class of 2017 were deemed ready for college-level reading, down from 56 percent in 2015.

In science, 45 percent of the Class of 2017 were ready for college-level courses, compared to 48 percent in 2015. The lowest score was in math, where 44 percent of the Class of 2017 were deemed ready for college courses, down from 48 percent in 2015.

“Those are not the percentages we want to see, and they’re headed in a direction we don’t want to see,” Murphy said. “We want to continue to give major focus to math in our school district.”

A point of struggle seems to be ninth-grade algebra, she said. The district wants to do more to prepare students for that, she said. It already is offered in the eighth grade, but not a large percentage of students take it in the eighth grade, she said.

The average composite score on the ACT college-prep test was 22.3 for the Class of 2017, down from 22.5 the past two years but still higher than the state average of 19.2, Murphy said.

The number of Advanced Placement exams taken by Hoover students has risen 39 percent since 2015, from 1,440 in 2015 to 1,988 in 2017, Murphy said. However, the percentage earning a qualifying score of 3 or higher (out of 5) fell from 64 percent to 63 percent.

The number of students taking International Baccalaureate exams fell from 257 in 2015 to 176 in 2017, and the percentage earning a qualifying score of 4 or higher fell from 79 percent to 75 percent.

The percentage of seniors earning both high school and college credit for classes through dual enrollment courses increased from 5.7 percent in 2015 to 11.3 percent in 2017, and the percentage of seniors earning an industry-approved ready-to-work certificate grew from 1.8 percent to 5.2 percent.

Hoover students appear to be making progress at the elementary and middle school level since 2015. The percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards in grades 3-8 has increased from 82 to 85 percent in English, from 65 to 74 percent in math, from 58 to 61 percent in reading and from 55 to 62 percent in science.

Financial progress

Murphy also shared how the school district is in a much better financial position than it was several years ago. Thanks to an increase in property tax revenues, additional money from the city of Hoover and cost-cutting measures, the school system ended fiscal 2016 with a $500,000 surplus — the first time the school district had ended a fiscal year in the black since 2011.

Then in 2017, the district ended with a $27.5 million surplus. However, much of that was attributed to $18.2 million of one-time money that will not be a continual source of revenue in the future. The district received an unexpected $9.1 million from Jefferson County and sold the former Berry High School to the Vestavia Hills Board of Education for $11 million and had $9.1 million of that left unspent, Chief Financial Officer Tina Hancock said.

The school board in late 2016 voted to pay off up to $7.5 million of debt and refinance a 2005 bond issue, saving the school district an estimated $4.5 million in today’s dollars over the life of the debt, Hancock said. The board also tripled its investment income by investing $50 million in treasury bonds, Murphy said.

However, bond payments are scheduled to go up by $2 million a year in 2020. Murphy said school officials anticipate refinancing their debt if interest rates are favorable enough.

It helps that Jefferson County voters approved 21.4 mills of property tax renewals in March of last year, securing that revenue through 2046. Those taxes brought in $20.6 million in 2015, Murphy said.

School officials also have continued to look for ways to cut costs, reducing staff as well as overtime hours, discretionary money and expenses for cell phones, Murphy said.

By the numbers

Here are some other interesting statistics Murphy shared in her address:

• The Hoover school system has 13,997 students enrolled in K-12 classes, ranging from 317 students at Shades Mountain Elementary to 2,883 students at Hoover High.
• Students in Hoover schools speak 131 languages, and 736 (5 percent) are considered “English language learners.”
• Sixty percent of the students in the system are white, while 24 percent are black, 8 percent are two or more races, 7 percent are Asian and less than 1 percent are American Indian or Pacific Islander.
• Eight percent of the students in Hoover City Schools are Hispanic or Latino.
• About 93 percent of the class of 2017 graduated in four years or less of high school.
• Forty-six percent of the nearly 1,100 seniors in the Class of 2017 for Hoover and Spain Park were offered scholarships that totaled $54 million ($24 million of which was accepted).
• The number of “special education” students in Hoover City Schools has grown from 1,152 in the 2014-15 school year to 1,291 in the 2016-17 school year, while the number of “enrichment” students has grown from 634 to 677 and the number of “gifted” students has grown from 21 to 38.
• Hoover City Schools had 3,459 student discipline infractions in 2016-17, or an average of 19 per day. The top infractions were truancy, unexcused tardies and defiance of authority.
• On an average day, 96 percent of students are in attendance.
• The number of students riding Hoover school buses in 2016-17 was 6,230 (45 percent of the total student population). The district used 127 buses and traveled 1,013,760 miles over the course of the year, at a cost of $7.9 million.
• The school district had 24,500 wireless devices on its computer network in 2016-17 and had 3.2 million Google documents created.
• The district served 1.7 million meals in 2016-17, including 1.2 million lunches and 512,177 breakfast meals. Twenty-four percent of students received free or reduced-price meals due to their family income levels.
• Payroll for Hoover City Schools in 2016-17 included $85.2 million for salaries, $34.7 million for benefits, $2.7 million for supplements and $106,052 for overtime.
• Hoover City Schools has 1,151 certified employees and 681 non-certified employees, including 131 teachers with certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, 15 teachers who have been inducted into the Jacksonville State University Teacher Hall of Fame, seven Alabama Teachers of the Year, and three national Milken Award winners. Seventy-eight percent of teachers have a master’s degree or higher.