Closed Howard High School could become the next APS middle school

Atlanta Public Schools could re-open the Old Fourth Ward’s Howard High School as a middle school.

The school would serve the Grady cluster, which includes some of the district’s most crowded schools.

Repurposing Howard is the latest idea in years of debate about how to ease crowding at Inman Middle School and other schools.

Inman’s current enrollment tops 1,000. The school has an official capacity of 875 students.

“I think there’s a desire to stop talking and start coming up with a plan,” said school board member Matt Westmoreland, whose district includes some of the affected schools.

Superintendent Meria Carstarphen will hold a public meeting Thursday at 6 p.m. at Inman to present her final proposal.

Howard opened in 1924 as an elementary school and was later converted to a high school. It closed in 1976. APS last used the building — for some small administrative groups — in 2008, spokesman James Malone said. In recent years, alumni and neighbors have urged APS to renovate and reopen Howard.

Martin Luther King Jr. attended Howard when it was a grammar school. The school also educated Atlanta’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, civil rights activist and presidential adviser Vernon Jordan, and construction and real estate businessman Herman J. Russell, among other notables.

“A lot of history at this school,” said Samuel Smith, who attended Howard from 1958-62.

Earlier this year, Carstarphen scrapped plans to expand the Inman building and suggested turning to Howard.

One possibility is reopening Howard as a middle school and using Inman as an elementary school, Westmoreland said.

The necessary renovations could cost more than $30 million, according to district estimates, and could be funded with Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, or SPLOST, proceeds.

Board member Leslie Grant, whose district also includes some of the affected schools, did not return messages from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

However, Carstarphen is not considering sending Grady cluster students to under-capacity APS schools in other clusters, Malone said.

APS administration officials declined to speak with the AJC this week about plans for the Grady cluster.

Meanwhile, development continues to flood into the intown neighborhoods that feed Grady, bringing new families and potential APS students.

“I just hope that we establish enough capacity in this cluster so that we’re not constantly, year after year putting Band-Aids on situations or causing parents to live in day-to-day angst over whether there’s enough space,” said Tamara Jones, who chairs Mary Lin Elementary School’s local school council.