Any projects would likely take at least three years, per school district officials.
DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — Parents, not students, walked the halls of Druid Hills High School Monday night, touring the school steeped in history. Betsy Wallace has a child who attends the high school. Overall, she said the experience had been fine, but aging infrastructure and other deteriorating conditions at the facility had come into question.
“I love that we have a neighborhood school that has good bones that could use a facelift and some love,” Wallace said. “It’s really not the time for Band-Aids. We’ve tried to Band-Aid over things. You can tell the school has kind of been patched together.”
Two years ago, students showed the deterioration at the school, from busted pipes to moldy walls. $50 million later, the school district is now looking to modernize the nearly 100-year-old school and bring it up to Georgia Department of Education code.
Erick Hofstetter, the chief operating officer with the DeKalb County School District, gave an update to parents inside the Druid Hills High School auditorium on where things stood for potential projects to take the school into the next century. The school was first built in 1927 and has even been a filming site for the famed movie Remember the Titans. On Monday night, Superintendent Dr. Devon Horton and several school board members also spoke to the crowd and took questions.
“We want to honor those traditions, but we have to stay future-focused for the next several generations with children that aren’t even alive yet we know are coming,” Hofstetter said. “We have to do right by them. We’re trying to be as open and transparent as possible. We don’t have all the answers. We could make solutions, but are those the solutions we all really want? That’s why we’re engaging in these meetings.”
The district is looking at three options when it comes to Druid Hills High School: renovate the school, update the school and add onto it, or replace the school altogether. Each brings its own challenges and price tags. The cost of the projects is estimated to range from $100-$200 million.
Hofstetter said any project would likely take three years to complete, and funding would come from the county’s E-SPLOST, or penny sales tax that would directly benefit education-related projects. Expanding the school ran into limitations in past years because Emory University owns chunks of the surrounding land.
“We’ll go as fast as we can but as slow as we need to go to where we get enough information and make the best-informed decision with the taxpayers’ responsibility,” Hofstetter said. “That’s a lot of money, and yet, are we solving a lot of the challenges and problems that we hear from the community about this school?”
Wallace said she felt as though momentum was building, and she hopes trust will too. She said she wanted consistency in whatever the district decided to propose to the school board. The school board, via vote, will have the final say on whether to move forward on any of the district’s proposals.
“If we’re not investing now, we’re kicking the can further and further down the road,” Wallace said. “This benefits my kids, but I also want it to benefit kids that are coming 20-30 years from now, too. When we go to other schools, they look modern, they look great and bright, and they look like great learning environments. I think that’s what we all want for our kids.”
