The doors opened to new campuses for Brumby Elementary and East Cobb Middle School Tuesday morning, as two overcrowded school grounds more than 50 years old gave way to twin facilities on Terrell Mill Road.
The day before a new school year began, staff and teachers at the East Cobb’s oldest schools rejoiced in a day they have been hoping would come about for many years.
Back-to-back ribbon-cutting festivities, followed by open house tours, doubled the excitement for both school communities.
“This community deserves this,” East Cobb MS principal Dr. Leetonia Young said to rousing cheers, referring to the two-story building as a “resort.”
Instead of five aging buildings bunched in on Holt Road, its home since it opened in 1963, East Cobb MS is just one building, and can handle an enrollment of 1,300 students.
“Compared to where you came from, this is a resort,” echoed Cobb schools Superintendent. Like young and other dignitaries who spoke at the festivities, he thanked Cobb voters for approving the Cobb Ed-SPLOST sales tax that financed construction of both new schools to a combined tune of more than $53 million.
Brumby Elementary, which opened in a single round building on Powers Ferry Road in 1966, was massively overcrowded even with additional buildings and 17 portable classrooms.
Not only was that unsafe for students and teachers, but it also posed traffic dangers for carpooling parents and bus queues that lined up on busy Powers Ferry Road.
A Brumby student who can attest to those conditions is rising fifth-grader Vincent Carter, a member of the school’s Boy Scout color guard.
He said it was “a really looooong walk” to leave class and go to the bathroom at the old school, and not fun at all in the rain.
He’ll get to enjoy his new school for only a year, but a year from now will start sixth grade next door at the new East Cobb Middle School.
Dr. Amanda Richie, the Brumby principal, got emotional discussing the evolution of the new school, which was about five years in the making. She also credited her faculty and staff that she said stuck together during some adverse times, trying to make do with an outdated campus.
“We’re a family, we’re the Brumby family,” she said. Because it’s a special group, she added, the new building will be “not just a school house, but a school home.
“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
Members of the family whose land made the new schools possible also were in attendance. Six generations of the Hill family lived and farmed on 40 acres on Terrell Mill Road, even after it was subdivided to descendants.
The land was sold to the Cobb County School District for just under $10 million in 2014, and construction got underway in the fall of 2016.
Ed Graham, the grandson of Dorsey and Sarah Hill, attended Brumby its first two years, and brought along the jersey he wore as a member of the first Brumby Bobcats football team.
While the land featured cows, pigs, some chickens and vegetables, to him and his siblings and his cousins, “it was a 40-acre playground.”
His cousin, Tracy Luttrell Bennett, recalled childhood memories that included pea-shelling, corn-shucking, selling vegetables to passers-by, homemade ice cream every Father’s Day, Easter egg hunts and sales of pumpkins and Christmas trees during the holidays.
“It’s a great honor to see these schools here today,” she said, encouraging the students to “work together, work hard, stay strong in the good times and the tough times, value your community and value your education.”
Cobb Board of Education member Scott Sweeney, who represents the Brumby and ECMS attendance zones, said that with their expanded capacity, the schools will be better able to serve as community centers.
While both schools have educational challenges—students come from cultural backgrounds that include a total of 40 languages and their enrollments have many transitory families—the extra elbow room can start to help make a difference.
Charlene Brisco, who is starting her sixth year as Brumby’s social worker, said she and her counselors have classroom space at the new school they didn’t have before, and that will enable them to conduct small-group meetings with students who need their help.
There’s also a food pantry to help out families in need, with room for a refrigerator that wasn’t available at the old school.
“Now we can expand what we’re doing,” she said.
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