After 20 years of inaction, Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts (CSLA) may have finally found a new home.
A majority of the members of the County School Board on Monday indicated they favor a recently hatched plan to put the award-winning school at the current Lakeside Elementary site by Highway 58.
School officials said it would cost over $35 million to build a new school at the current site on East Brainerd Road.
An option discussed earlier of buying the Sears portion of Northgate Mall would have been around $33 million, including a $6.4 million acquisition cost from developer Bassam Issa.
Officials said some $25 million is still available from an earlier county bond issue and that may cover the costs of renovating the current Lakeside Elementary and building a new section.
Tucker McClendon, who heads the board's facilities committee, said the current aged school is "abysmal" and the schools need to take advantage of the current opportunity to get the students into a new and renovated building.
"It's hard for me to pass up this chance," he said.
Chairman Joe Wingate said everyone will not agree with the move, but "we have the money at hand when really nobody else has money. I just think we've got to move on this and take care of some stuff that has been a long time coming."
Rhonda Thurman, Steve Highlander and Kathy Lennon also spoke in favor.
Karitsa Mosley Jones said a number of residents around the Lakeside School had concerns about CSLA coming in.
Board member Jenny Hill said there were "a lot of Black and Brown faces" at the current school and that 'upper middle class" students would be coming in with the shift to CSLA. She said, "Racial equity matters to me."
Ms. Thurman said Lakeside students are already set to be moving to the new Harrison Elementary School and she said Lakeside magnet students who opt to join CSLA would also be getting new quarters.
She said, "This has nothing to do with racial equity or whatever. They're all getting a brand new school."
Ms. Lennon said CSLA students "have great diversity. There's Black, Brown, Yellow and whatever."
She said it was "a good solution with the money we've got," and CSLA students had been "pushed back for far too long."
Tiffanie Robinson said she had favored the Sears plan and wanted to know why it had fallen off the table. Ms. Lennon said it was because "the price went up so much."
Justin Robertson, schools COO, said there had been talk years earlier about building a new CSLA school that would cost over $60 million. He said that would have been a much larger school for many more students.
The school at Lakeside will move CSLA from the current K-8 to K-12, but it would be built for 1,000 students. It had some 500 K-8 students now.
Supt. Bryan Johnson said the board needed to take some type of action, saying it could not keep hanging onto the bond money.
He said the move would take care of facility needs at both the old and new campus for CSLA and leave the 35-acre East Brainerd campus for possible use later for a new elementary in that growing section.
A vote is expected at the regular board meeting on Thursday.