Families in Mobile’s Trinity Gardens neighborhood will get their first real look at what a long-planned replacement school will actually look like when Mobile County school system officials hold a public meeting at Chastang Middle School. The gathering is set for 6 p.m. and will center on architectural renderings and construction details for the new Fournier-Chastang K-8 School, a project that has been in the works for months as part of a broader push to modernize aging campuses across the county.
The new building will replace two schools that have served the Trinity Gardens area for decades. Students currently attending the former Brazier Elementary campus and Chastang Middle School will eventually move into a single combined K-8 facility, a shift school system leaders say will streamline resources and give younger and older students access to updated classrooms and shared facilities under one roof. The new campus is planned to sit along Interstate 65, giving it a visible presence for a community that has watched the surrounding corridor change over the years.
The roughly $14 million project carries a name that reflects the district’s own history. Earlier in the year, the Mobile County school board voted to attach the Fournier name to the new building, honoring Hazel Fournier, a longtime board member and school system employee whose career was closely tied to local education efforts. Pairing her name with the existing Chastang identity was meant to preserve continuity for a community that has known the middle school under that name for years.
This project is not an isolated one. It marks the second entirely new school building to move forward under the school system’s $100 million bond initiative, a financing program aimed at replacing or renovating a handful of the district’s oldest facilities. Hoar Program Management, the firm overseeing construction management for the broader bond program, has been coordinating timelines and budgets across the various campus projects included in that initiative.
According to Tommy Sheffield, the school system’s executive facilities manager, the Fournier-Chastang project is expected to go out to bid in November, opening the door for construction contractors to submit proposals for the work. Once a contractor is selected, officials estimate the build itself will take more than a year to complete, meaning students are not likely to walk the halls of the finished school until sometime after the 2015-2016 school year gets underway.
At the public meeting, school system representatives plan to walk attendees through the proposed layout and design choices, while also fielding questions from parents, teachers and neighborhood residents who want a say in how the new campus takes shape. For a stretch of Mobile County that has waited years for updated school facilities, the session represents one of the first concrete steps toward seeing the K-8 school move from bond-program paperwork to an actual construction timeline.