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By Buzz Trexler
Star Correspondent

It was about three years in the making, but on Friday the Elizabethton City Schools Community Development and Engagement Center was officially opened with a crowd of about 40 people attending the ribbon-cutting.

The center, located at the former Union Prescription Shop at 402 Bemberg Road, was the first stop on a city schools tour for members of the City Council and Board of Education.

Director of Schools Richard VanHuss told the crowd the vision for the center started with a phone call from Dr. Jon Minton, principal at Elizabethton High School. “We were looking at a bigger vision that we knew wasn’t going to work out,” VanHuss said, and Minton suggested the former pharmacy building that had been vacant since 2020. The school board purchased the building on July 1, 2022, for $355,000, according to state tax records, and contracts for renovation were approved in July 2023.

“We don’t have a whole lot of real estate around us, and so when it becomes available, we had to obviously look into making the purchase to benefit our school and the system as a whole,” Minton said. The system had funds from XQ and reserve COVID-related funding that could be used to support the community, which Minton said was one of the five core values at the high school.

“There’s been some investment from everyone in the city, the school and the school board. So, this has just been a long time coming,” Minton said. “So, we’re just really happy to be here, and it’s already filling up quick.”

The building now houses two office spaces, a conference room, kitchenette, restrooms and is home to the Family Resource Center and alternative school.

“This space is open for the community as well,” VanHuss said. “If a group wants to use it, we have a facilities-use form and a process to do that. So, we’re looking for this to be of benefit to not just the school community, but the community as a whole.”

“Again, this is a reality because of so many people in this room — school board, City Council and all of you, the community members that are here, that have made this a reality,” the director said. “That’s the best part about Elizabethton — and I’m not telling you anything that you don’t know — but our sense of community is second to none, and when our community needs something, we rally around each other, and this is a prime example of that.”

Tour of Schools

Members of the City Council and the Board of Education were then given the opportunity to tour the city’s four schools — East Side Elementary School, Harold McCormick Elementary School, T.A. Dugger Junior High School and Elizabethton High School.

At West Side Elementary, Principal John R. Wright told the group the school has a record number of students, with about 370 in attendance. “We have to turn away a ton of kids each year,” he said, noting that this is a similar problem faced by East Side and Harold McCormick schools. “People are just wanting to get into Elizabethton City Schools, and I think that says a lot that we’re turning away 20, 30 students a year.”

Wright said the school has made several alterations to try and accommodate the growing number of students. “We’ve taken several of our larger rooms and we’ve cut them in half and made two rooms,” he said. “Our old library, we’ve put an additional room in there; our new library, we’ve cut it in half and now part of it’s a classroom and part of it’s a library. We’ve got another room that we’ve made an office in. Our teacher workroom, we’ve made two offices out of that, so we don’t have a teacher workroom.”

The principal said the school would like to regain some of those spaces through a planned addition that would include four classrooms, two small group spaces, two restrooms, a large “flex space” with seating, an enclosed courtyard space for play and instruction, and a paved basketball court on the large playground.

When the vision was first cast, Wright said, the cost was estimated at $2.5 million. While he admitted it was “wishful thinking,” the principal said an appropriate year for groundbreaking would be 2029 — West Side Elementary’s 100th anniversary.

At Elizabethton High School, Minton took the group through the facility, explaining how the school works to ensure students have opportunities for involvement beyond the classroom. “We did some research a couple of years ago. We took every student that was enrolled in the school that was involved in at least one extracurricular activity at EHS and measured that against students that weren’t, and looked at their GPA and academic success,” Minton said. “We found that students on average had eight-tenths of a grade-point average higher if they were involved in at least one extracurricular activity.”

The group toured the band room and “Cyclone Alley,” an area where students can get a grab-and-go breakfast from a kiosk. The area was created by moving a row of lockers that were no longer needed. Among the other areas toured were the commons area, the career and technical education classroom, and the construction site for the Dave Rider Center for Athletic Performance.

At T.A. Dugger Junior High, Principal Chris Berry talked about the surveillance system at the school that helps when staff members need to investigate an incident. Other improvements he highlighted were newly painted walls and floors that were redone over the summer. “We’re in the process of trying to get back to that orange, black and white, you know, our true colors,” he said.

As with West Side Elementary, Berry said T.A. Dugger is looking to a future expansion. “Just like the high school, we’re growing,” he said, estimating that current enrollment is between 620 and 630 students who are drawn from throughout the county. “We’ve outgrown a lot of space,” Berry said as he talked about an expansion that would add six classrooms.

Student activities are spread across five buildings, the principal said, adding that the school has the only auditorium in the system and a historic gym.

“What we looked at is building an addition right here in front of the gymnasium that would come out here toward E Street,” VanHuss said. “That would still maintain the view in front of the school, which I think a lot of people would want.” The addition would tie in the media center, now a separate structure, as part of the main building, which would eliminate an exterior move students have to make every time they go to the library.

At Harold McCormick Elementary, the group took part in a ribbon-cutting that officially opened a renovated wing, the first phase of an ongoing project that included 11 fully remodeled classrooms and two partially renovated rooms. The renovation included full asbestos abatement in the portion that was remodeled, new water, HVAC and electrical infrastructure, and “pretty much anything that could be done, was done,” said Principal Eric Wampler.

The group toured the schools by bus, and when it approached East Side Elementary, Principal Travis Hurley pointed out, “The parking lot has probably been the biggest addition to East Side in a while, because we host Junior Cyclones boys’ and girls’ basketball because our rims go up and down, our goals go up and down, so every Saturday from early October to just last week we had basketball tournaments every Saturday at the school.”

As with other schools in the system, East Side’s recent upgrades included secure entrances and the installation of ballistic film on windows.

Elizabethton Vice Mayor Mike Simerly said after the tour, “I just thought it was great to get the opportunity to see how our taxpayers’ dollars are being spent with the school system. It’s just so encouraging to go out to the individual schools, to see how clean they are and how everything is organized. …

“I’m just very encouraged, very excited about the system itself as a whole, how it’s being operated, of course, with Mr. VanHuss and our school board. It’s very solid, and I’m so proud of them and the job they’re doing. The children are our future, and you know we have to consider that, and more importantly we have to educate them best we can with the dollars that we have available.”