The Mobile County school board approved spending about $1 million to buy land near the existing Lott Middle and Citronelle High schools, part of a wide-ranging construction and renovation program in the northern Mobile County city.
The purchases, approved in a single round of board action, covered two separate sites in Citronelle and were described by school officials as the necessary groundwork for projects that would reshape both campuses. For a community sitting at the far northern edge of Alabama’s largest county, the votes marked the most tangible step yet in a building program that had been in planning for months.
The Lott Middle School purchase
The board agreed to purchase three parcels of property, about 5.48 acres, next to Lott Middle School at a cost of $280,000. The land was owned by Advantage Investment Corp.
The City of Citronelle owned the property surrounding those three parcels, and city officials planned to lease that land to the board once the purchase was approved, according to Tommy Sheffield, the school system’s facilities manager. The arrangement would expand the site to about 18 acres.
The city-school partnership was central to making the deal work. Rather than requiring the board to buy every acre it needed, the two governments split the burden: the school system purchased the privately held core of the expansion, and the city contributed the surrounding land it already owned through a long-term lease. Arrangements of that kind are a familiar tool for Alabama school systems, which often find that assembling a workable campus is easier and cheaper when a municipality has a stake in the outcome.
Room for fields and future growth
Some of the additional land was slated to become practice fields, to be used by the middle school’s athletic teams and by the city’s youth leagues, Sheffield said. The combination of a school purchase and a municipal lease reflected a common approach for stretching limited dollars while assembling enough acreage for both classrooms and recreation.
Shared fields serve double duty in a town of Citronelle’s size. During the school day and after-school practice hours, they belong to the middle school’s football, baseball and softball programs; on evenings and Saturdays, they open to the city’s youth leagues, which have long depended on whatever space the community can provide. A single investment in grading, drainage and turf thus pays off twice, and both governments have an enduring interest in maintaining it.
The added acreage also gave the school system room it rarely has at older campuses. Lott Middle, like many schools built in earlier decades, sits on a tight site, and finding space for expanded athletic facilities inside the existing property lines had not been an option. The 5.48 acres from Advantage Investment Corp., combined with the city’s leased land, solved that problem at a stroke.
The new high school site
The board also approved the purchase of five parcels for $798,500 at the proposed 13-acre site for a new Citronelle High School. The system already owned 10 acres at that site, which was bordered by Lebaron Avenue, Highway 45 and Centre Street. The five newly acquired parcels lay alongside the board’s existing property and Highway 45.
Together, the acquisitions rounded out a contiguous campus on one of Citronelle’s main corridors. Highway 45 is the town’s lifeline, running north to the Mississippi state line and south through Mobile County toward Mount Vernon and Citronelle’s neighbors, and frontage along it made the new site visible and accessible to families across the area.
Land prices in northern Mobile County are modest by the standards of the county’s western suburbs, but a purchase approaching $800,000 for five parcels still ranked among the larger land deals in the system’s building program. School officials characterized the cost as the price of getting the right site rather than the cheapest one – a lesson the system had already learned the hard way in Citronelle.
Why the school had to move
School officials had first planned to build the new Citronelle High School at its original location, but soil tests showed the ground there was not stable enough to support a two-story building, which the new design required. That finding forced a change of site and contributed to delays.
The geotechnical setback was a reminder of how much of school construction is decided below the surface. Before any architect’s rendering becomes a building, engineers drill and sample the ground beneath it, and soils that cannot carry the load of a multi-story structure – common in the sandy, clay-layered terrain of the Gulf Coast – force a redesign or a relocation. In Citronelle’s case, the tests ruled out the original campus, and the system went looking for ground that could hold what the community needed.
By the time of the land purchases, the new high school was running about two months behind schedule. The slip was measured in weeks rather than seasons, but for a town that had been promised a replacement for an aging high school, every month counted.
Bidding the work
Hoar Program Management was set to call for bids on July 29 to clear and prepare the 13 acres for construction. The bid date for the new building itself was Nov. 20, with work expected to begin roughly six weeks afterward.
The sequencing was deliberate. Site preparation has to be bid and substantially complete before a general contractor can build on firm ground, so the system moved the land work first and scheduled the building package for the fall. The roughly six-week gap between the November bid and the expected construction start reflected the time needed to award the contract, finalize documents and mobilize equipment to the site.
The Lott Middle School project, which included renovation of existing buildings along with new construction, was scheduled to go up for bid on Dec. 3, less than two weeks after the high school package. Renovation-and-addition projects of that kind are typically more complicated to bid than new construction, because contractors must price work around buildings that remain in use by students during the school year.
Part of a larger building push
Both projects were folded into a much larger effort: Hoar was managing and overseeing about $100 million in school construction projects for the Mobile County system over the following two years.
Hoar Program Management, a Birmingham-based firm with a long record of managing large public building programs across the Southeast, served as the system’s owner’s representative – tracking budgets, coordinating architects and engineers, and shepherding projects through the bid process. For a school district spread across an entire county, from downtown Mobile to the state line, having a single program manager keep dozens of projects on schedule was central to the plan.
The $100 million program touched communities across Mobile County, but few stood to gain more visibly than Citronelle. Small towns often wait longest for major capital projects, since population centers elsewhere generate more immediate crowding pressure. The two Citronelle projects represented an unusually large share of the program’s reach in the northern part of the county.
Superintendent Martha Peek and the board framed the purchases as necessary steps to keep the projects moving, even as the high school timeline slipped. In a building program of that size, land deals are the hinge between planning and construction: without clear title to the acreage, neither the site-preparation bids nor the building bids can responsibly go forward.
What it meant for Citronelle
For Citronelle, a community at the far northern reach of the county, the investments signaled a substantial commitment to its schools. A new high school and upgraded middle school promised modern facilities and expanded athletic space, while the land deals laid the groundwork for construction that would reshape the campuses for a generation of students.
Citronelle has long identified itself with its schools. The city, known for its oil fields and its position as the northern gateway to Mobile County, draws families from a wide surrounding area, and the high school serves as a community anchor for events that extend well beyond the school day. A modern campus on Highway 45 was understood locally as an investment in the town’s ability to hold and attract residents in a county where growth had been concentrated far to the south.
The two-campus approach also reflected the way students move through the system. Children who started at Lott Middle would, within a few years, walk into a new high school, and the upgraded athletic fields would carry them from youth leagues through middle school competition on the same ground.
Timeline and open questions
For families in and around Citronelle, the timeline mattered as much as the dollar figures. Each delay pushed back the day when students would move into a modern building, and the shift to a new site raised practical questions about traffic, access and the fate of the old campus.
Moving a high school to a new location changes daily routines for hundreds of families. Bus routes had to be redrawn, and the boundary along Lebaron Avenue, Highway 45 and Centre Street would carry the morning and afternoon traffic of an entire student body. The old campus, meanwhile, presented the district with decisions about reuse that would come later, once the new building opened.
Still, the land purchases represented tangible progress after months of planning, and they positioned the district to advance both projects through the bidding stages that would follow. Within weeks, contractors would be pricing the site work, and by late fall the community would know which builders would construct its new high school. For a town that had watched the project slip, the board’s votes were the surest sign yet that the wait was moving toward its end.