Negotiations over Saraland’s split from the Mobile County Public School System had gone quiet, and the city’s superintendent said he was running out of time.
State School Superintendent Joe Morton had directed the two sides during the summer to complete the necessary transactions by Oct. 15. With that deadline days away, Saraland School Superintendent Paul Sousa said his side had heard nothing for weeks.
‘We’re just sitting here waiting’
“We met several times, their group and our group, and made a lot of progress,” Sousa said. Then, on Aug. 15, Mobile County Superintendent Harold Dodge informed him that the county system’s attorneys had taken the documents, and that there would be no more meetings while the lawyers had them.
“We wrote letters and asked to continue the negotiations to no avail,” Sousa said. “Then we got a letter with their version. We looked at it and said, ‘Okay, we agree with a lot of this, but it needs further clarification and fine-tuning.’ We asked to sit down again and finish this thing.”
County officials, according to Sousa, replied that the deal could be finalized by letter. Sousa did not believe it. Only a face-to-face meeting, he said, would be productive and conclusive.
“We sent back a document with all our concerns in writing and we’ve heard nothing since then,” he said. “We’re going to run out of time. We’re concerned. We’ve got to build a high school and we can’t move forward until we have a school system. We’re just sitting here waiting.”
Sousa expected the state to assign a mediator to force the sides to an agreement.
What Saraland was trying to build
Saraland residents voted in June 2006 to break away from the 65,000-student Mobile County Public School System, the largest in Alabama. No other municipality in the county had sought to leave.
The new city board sought to take over two schools it did not yet own — Saraland Elementary and Adams Middle School, both then belonging to the county system — in the fall of 2008. It planned to build a new high school, roughly $18 million and about 1,100 students, to open at the start of the 2009 school year. That timeline is what made the delay so costly: no deal meant no system, and no system meant no way to move forward on the building.
Sousa was at pains to point out that what Saraland proposed was ordinary. “There are 64 city school systems in Alabama, 12 in Jefferson County,” he said. “We’re not reinventing the wheel here. Saraland is committed to this. The city is already collecting taxes to fund the system.”
“Saraland has done everything it could do,” he said. “We didn’t want to fight. We just wanted to negotiate.”
Why separations are hard
Splitting a school system is less an educational decision than a property settlement. Buildings, buses, land, employee contracts, debt and federal desegregation obligations all have to be divided, and the county system giving up territory has little incentive to make it easy. Every student who leaves takes state funding along, and every building transferred is an asset lost.
Saraland officials still hoped to begin operations with the 2008 school year. They did. The Saraland City Schools opened as an independent system in the fall of 2008, and Saraland High School opened the following year — roughly on the schedule Sousa was defending when the talks stalled.
The city’s departure proved to be the first of several in Mobile County. Satsuma and Chickasaw each voted to form their own systems in the years that followed, reshaping the map of public education north of Mobile.