Nearly two years after an EF-1 tornado tore through Murphy High School’s historic Midtown campus, Mobile County school officials say a new round of construction is underway, this time targeting the main academic building itself, with a repair bill expected to stretch well beyond $20 million once every phase is complete.
Interior renovations on the main building began recently and will unfold in four separate phases over roughly a year, according to Tommy Sheffield, facilities manager for the Mobile County school system. The work includes adding an elevator and bringing the building up to current code requirements, at an estimated cost of about $15 million.
Sheffield said school officials deliberately chose a slower, phased construction approach rather than rushing the repairs, largely to limit how much students’ daily routines are disrupted as classroom groups are shuffled in and out of portable buildings during construction. “It’s not about how fast can we do it; it’s how fast we can do it without disrupting the education process,” he said.
The approach reflects lessons learned from the aftermath of the December 2012 storm, when Murphy students were relocated for an entire semester to a cluster of roughly 70 portable classrooms set up at Clark-Shaw Magnet School. Sheffield said that experience underscored just how disruptive large-scale portable classroom arrangements can be for students and staff alike. Murphy currently has about 20 portables in use, which Sheffield described as close to the maximum the campus can reasonably support while renovations continue.
Looking ahead, school officials expect to begin working with architects within the next month on interior designs for the campus’s Lois Jean Delaney Auditorium, with that project slated to go out for bids next August, around the same time the school’s new band room is expected to be finished. The auditorium’s roof and exterior repairs are largely complete, but interior work is projected to cost about $3 million, with a best-case completion target of August 2016.
Altogether, school officials estimate the full slate of tornado-related repairs at Murphy will take about two years and cost at least $25 million. Funding is coming from a mix of sources, including a $30 million state bond issue authorized by the Alabama Legislature in May 2013 to help six tornado-damaged schools statewide, of which Murphy’s share amounts to roughly $15 million. Additional funds are being drawn from insurance proceeds and the Mobile County school system’s own capital fund.
For a campus that has already weathered years of temporary classrooms and phased construction, the timeline represents both a milestone and a reminder of how long recovery from a natural disaster can take, even with dedicated state and local funding in place.