School zones, New Butler (1).jpg

New zones for Huntsville City Schools take effect this year as a result of legal negotiations with U.S. Department of Justice

(Picasa)

You may not have noticed yet, but this is a new and different city today.

Thanks to the desegregation compromise.

Huntsville hasn't shuffled school zones since 1970. At least not very much. And never downtown.

But things are different.

For the first time in 45 years, the downtown neighborhoods have been redefined. Homes long separated by the Parkway will see children joined from kindergarten through graduation.

Perhaps no school is more thoroughly transformed than Huntsville Middle, which becomes Huntsville Junior High and now gets children from as far west as Madison Square Mall.

The Latino students of McDonnell Elementary are headed to Grissom. The majority of the children in public housing are now headed to Huntsville High. Many used to go to Butler.

For that matter, much of the city, from UAH to Owens Cross Roads, from Monte Sano to the homes near WEUP, will be funneled into Huntsville High.

School board's plan

This wasn't what the school board had in mind when they decided to take on the Department of Justice last year.

The city planned to send more of the Butler students, more of the poorest areas, to the new predominantly black Jemison High.

But the feds demanded the city make a stronger effort at desegregating the schools. They asked that the city send more black children to majority white Huntsville High.

There are many more changes. Every high school will be affected. But this one compromise is the key compensation demanded to balance the scales for legal segregation two generations ago.

Decades of sprawl

Historically, it's a big moment for this city.

Since 1970, the date of that first school desegregation order, the center city school zones have remained frozen. The growth for five decades has been at the city edges, where it was easy to tack on new school zones.

In the 1970s, new families moved near the brand new Grissom and Johnson high schools. They were both majority white. Huntsville schools peaked in the early '70s. Growth stopped. Things were steady for awhile. Then jobs moved to Houston, and the boom went bust.

In the 1980s, the only growth was in the south. Huntsville school board opened Challenger Middle and Elementary in the late 1980s to keep up with all the new children. The city built a road through Jones Valley in 1989.

By the 1990s, Jeff Enfinger and John Hays crossed into Big Cove to find room to expand. They re-named the backside of Monte Sano for Hays' great grandfather. "It had a nice marketing ring to it," Hays told the newspaper in 1998. The city approved the first 416 lots of Hampton Cove in 1992. Congress approved a special postal designation, allowing mail to be delivered to Hampton Cove instead of Owens Cross Roads.

The city opened Hampton Cove Elementary in 1996 and added a middle school in 2003.

But throughout the 1990s, other than Hampton Cove, most of the residential growth was outside the city limits, in Madison and in Monrovia and in the county. By the late 1990s, north Huntsville schools had resegregated and were beginning to see signs of black middle class flight. The county schools were adding 500 new students a year. Johnson appeared on state watch lists for test scores. Huntsville High dwindled to a 1,000 kids.

"The Madison County and (Madison) City School Systems," said Mo Brooks in 1999, "are starting to eat Huntsville's lunch."

Heading west

By 2000, growth had stagnated everywhere but Hampton Cove. And the city leaders looked to the deer runs and cotton fields to the west. "Schools are the key," said former mayor Loretta Spencer in 1999. "That is the enticement for developers to build."

The school board didn't want to go west. There were no kids to there, not enough homes, not past the mall. State money for schools was based on enrollment. How would the board pay for all the teachers in a school in an empty field?

New zone for Huntsville Junior High

But the mayor forced the issue and the city itself paid most of the cost of building Columbia High and Providence School to grow something new, something the newspaper referred to as "far west Huntsville." The new zones took from Butler High.

Former Mayor Loretta Spencer said the military families didn't want to be zoned for Butler. "The distance was a concern of theirs," she said in 2003, "and certainly academics being as strong as possible. The (military) children can't get behind for a year. That was stressed to me over and over again."

The schools opened in 2005. The area boomed, especially after the BRAC of 2005. It might be hard to picture now, but just 10 years ago there was still undeveloped land between Huntsville and Madison.

Recent developments target center city

School zones alone aren't enough to remake a city. But this time, in the center city, Huntsville has already entered a period of transformation. The tide that went out for 45 years has begun to return. Growth and development dollars, both private and public, began to move downtown seven or eight years ago.

This rediscovery of the center-city started in 2008 and 2009 with the controversial removal of the homeless shelter and the contested tearing down of public housing alongside Huntsville Hospital and the unpopular closing of schools in west Huntsville.

On the moving of public housing to apartments in south Huntsville: "I think what they've done is drop a big bomb in the middle of this community," said the late City Councilwoman Sandra Moon in 2010. "It's escalated racial tensions, widened a divide in the perceptions of the haves versus have-nots; none of that is good for the community."

On the moving of the homeless shelter away from Lowe Mill: "I'm sure the past administration wanted to buy that property to clean out that neighborhood, and that's a good thing," said Councilman Mark Russell in 2009. "But I would argue that common sense tells me that a building in a neighborhood that is having troubles is not going to be worth $3.9 million."

On the closing of five center city schools: "We're strengthening the city core," said former board member Jennie Robinson in 2010, "and we can't ever forget that second part of the plan."

It's easy to see that all of these contested moves marked the setting of a course, and that the city and the schools and the private developers have been accelerating along this course in the last two or three years. There have been many opponents along the way, groups in south and north Huntsville who have spoken out against the emphasis on downtown.

But things are happening regardless of the serial opposition. The Coke plant and the Holiday Inn are gone. Developers are building more apartments. Publix popped up near the hospital and Whole Foods is coming. The city is clearing the way for a boulevard from Governors, a new downtown driveway. There are tentative plans to tear down Sparkman Homes and plans to move police into Seldon Center and nonprofits into the old AAA.

And now the school zoning, the framework that defines residential neighborhoods, has been rewritten in private negotiations with the federal government.

Will the development roll west to fill in the new neighborhoods now zoned for Huntsville High? Will parents, as has happened so many times before in this city, abandon schools that suddenly see more poor students, more students who maybe arrive further behind than cross-town peers?

It's far from clear how it will all work out.

What is safe to say is that Huntsville has entered a period of transformation.

To see how it plays out, watch Huntsville Junior High and watch Whitesburg Middle, the two schools most changed by the federal compromise.