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 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.
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.
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.
A relocated high school
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.
By the time of the land purchases, the new high school was running about two months behind schedule. 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.
Part of a larger building push
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. 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.
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. Superintendent Martha Peek and the board framed the purchases as necessary steps to keep the projects moving, even as the high school timeline slipped.
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. 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.