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The Madison County school system wants to build a new high school in Monrovia to relieve overcrowding at Sparkman High, located on Jeff Road in Harvest. (File photo)

HARVEST, Alabama -- The Madison County school board held a special session this evening to give residents of the Sparkman and Monrovia communities a chance to speak their minds.

At issue was a new, $46-million high school proposed for the Monrovia community. The school is designed to alleviate overcrowding at Sparkman High School, one of Alabama's largest schools.

AL.com was at Sparkman during the session, live-blogging speakers' comments. Some speakers repeated the concerns of previous speakers, and their comments are not listed below.

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6:15 p.m.: School board president Jeff Anderson thanked the sizable crowd for attending, and the nine or 10 people who spoke up for doing so.



"There will be no decisions made tonight," Anderson said. "But we wanted and we needed to hear what you have to say."

Anderson said the board would go into executive session during their regular business meeting, being held immediately after the special session, and that one of the topics of conversation would be land.

The majority of the complaints from those who signed up to speak involved the effects of splitting up the Sparkman student body, whether or not $46 million would be enough money to build a first-class high school, traffic woes in the neighborhood around a new school and the money that would be required to operate a new high school.

Beth Bismack said she was speaking on behalf of her daughter, a Sparkman student. She said her daughter has told her the students do not want a new high school, but "would just like their Sparkman fixed."

"One of the things that makes Sparkman Sparkman is the diversity," Bismack said. "That is one of the things that prepares our children for the real world. I am concerned that, if we split schools, we will lose some of the diversity at both schools."

5:47 p.m.: Caroline Shaw, a member of the Sparkman Middle community, asked the board why the new school is being built instead of expanding Sparkman. Initially, Madison County Superintendent David Copeland had recommended using $20 million in available capital funds to expand the Sparkman campus.

Shaw said there is no need to break up the Sparkman High School student body into two schools.

Shaw brought up the lengths that board members went to for parental input on a new, staggered school bus schedule intended to alleviate overcrowding on the buses. She said that a survey was sent out for the bus schedule, but less effort has been made to get input on a school that will cost the district the majority of the $55.9 million in BRAC funds it has received for new and expanded facilities.

Shaw also questioned whether outside political influences are driving the board's decision to build a new school.

"The BRAC money being used on this debacle is not being given with a string attached, but a chain," Shaw said.

5:35 p.m.: School board president Jeff Anderson started the meeting by going over the ground rules. Each speaker gets five minutes, and speakers have been asked not to repeat points brought up by other speakers.

John McFarland, a member of the Monrovia community, was the first speaker. He has children at Legacy Elementary and Monrovia Middle School. McFarland passed each board member, and Superintendent David Copeland, a packet of information that he said includes more than 450 signatures from residents in the Monrovia community.

McFarland said all of those people signed their names in support of what he was about to say. He told the superintendent and board that the site rumored to be the top choice for the new school is a bad one.

Though the board has been mum on potential sites for the Monrovia high school, minutes from a Jan. 21 community advisory board meeting indicate that the top choice for the school is a site on the east side of Alabama 53, between Douglass and Kelly Spring roads.

McFarland said that his initial concern about that location is traffic congestion. He said the roadway was widened some time ago to speed up traffic.

A new school zone in that area would slow it down, he said.

"The bottleneck created by this school zone could create a traffic nightmare," McFarland said.

McFarland suggested an alternative site the district had been vetting in the Pine Grove area. He said the Pine Grove site would be big enough, would have plenty of ingress and egress, and has two fire stations located within a couple of miles.

David Weis, a Sparkman parent, spoke up next, saying that the public "conversation" about the new high school should have been taken up 18 months ago.

"The time to have meaningful conversation about this high school has long passed," Weis said.

Weis said that he thinks the amount of money slated for the new school, $46 million, will not be enough to build the high school the community is being promised. He pointed out that the Madison school district paid $58 million for James Clemens High School.

He said, too, that the tight budget of the county district does not allow for the millions it would take to operate a new high school every year.

He urged the board to expand Sparkman High instead of building a new school.

"I believe it isn't too late to find a solution that would benefit the schools here, but also the district as a whole," Weis said.

Background of the proposed Monrovia high school

The county school board is still trying to determine where to build the new high school, which Anderson has said would require about 60 acres to provide enough room for the school, a football field and other facilities. The current Sparkman campus is about 48 acres.

The new school is being designed by SKT Architects and is anticipated to accommodate about 1,600 students. Sparkman High currently has an enrollment of almost 1,800.

Besides the new high school, the BRAC funds are also expected to fund a new intermediate school near Lynn Fanning Elementary in Meridianville, a new academic building at Madison County Elementary in Gurley and a new wing at Madison County High School, also in Gurley.