Jemison High School, McNair Junior High construction soon to be underway

Construction of Jemison High School and McNair Junior High will soon be underway.

The Huntsville school board on Tuesday night approved a $61 million contract with Auburn-based Bailey Harris Construction to erect the combined Jemison-McNair campus on Pulaski Pike, just north of Stringfield Road. The entire project, from design to construction, is budgeted at $65 million.

Jeff Wilson, director of operations for Huntsville City Schools, said the construction work begins Wednesday. Site work was recently completed on the property, paving the way for building to begin.

The Jemison-McNair campus, scheduled to open in August 2016, will have combined education space of more than 331,000 square feet and will have the capacity to serve 1,100 high school students and 540 middle-schoolers. Jemison will serve students from Butler and Johnson high schools; Butler is slated to close this summer and Johnson will close in the summer of 2016.

McNair will serve students from the former Davis Hills and Ed White middle schools; those schools' students are currently attending McNair Junior High in its temporary home on the old Davis Hills campus. The former Ed White campus is being renovated to become the new home of the Academy of Academics and Arts and Davis Hills will be used to expand the Academy for Science and Foreign Language, which is already housed there.

The Jemison-McNair campus will include a 0.9-mile racetrack as part of the Greenpower USA initiative, which will give students in the district's advanced manufacturing academy the opportunity to learn how to design, build and race electric cars. Jemison, Grissom High and Whitesburg P-8 will be the base of operations for the program, the first of its kind in the U.S.

Jemison High School is being named for Decatur-born astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison, who became the first black woman in space when she flew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor in September 1992. McNair Junior High is named for Ronald McNair, the second African-American in space and one of seven astronauts killed in January 1986 when the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated shortly after liftoff from Cape Canaveral.

The board also heard a brief synopsis of the district's formal process for requesting public information.

"We've been working on formalizing our procedures so they could be more transparent," said Johnny Giles, chief of staff for the district.

Giles said that documents deemed public under Alabama law will be provided to anyone who requests them, with employees' or students' personal information redacted as necessary.

"If an individual has a request, they make that request through the compliance office," Giles said.

Making requests through a single office will allow the district to track the requests and get them to the right division within the central office, he said.

Paper documents can be provided to members of the public at a cost of 25 cents per page, Giles said. Any DVDs or CDs can be provided at a cost of $10 per disc.

If documents are available on the district's website, the person requesting those documents will be pointed to the right location on the site.

Other items approved during the business portion of the meeting include:

• A $24,370 contract with Nick Rail Music for musical instruments for McNair Junior High;
• An advanced composite shop package worth $114,645 for the new Grissom High School, awarded to Advanced Composite Education Services;
• Contract amendments worth more than $480,000 with Chapman Sisson Architects, the firm designing the Jemison-McNair and Grissom campuses; and
• A letter of recommendation for Fuqua & Partners to design planned renovations at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary. The project design and architect agreement, with the fee, will be approved at a later date.