Photo by Erin Nelson.
Julia Parker, 10, in blue, and Bryant Roberts, 10, hang on the monkey bars on the playground at Vestavia Hills Elementary Dolly Ridge during recess,Thursday, Oct. 3, 2019.
Vestavia Hills Elementary Dolly Ridge is off to a great start in its first semester, Principal Ty Arendall said.
It was “a little terrifying” to start school after a summer of planning because “you don’t know what you don’t know,” Arendall said. “When you’ve never had a single school day at a new place, there’s so much planning that goes into that.”
Still, Arendall said the staff had good plans in place and had worked ahead of potential problems. While the staff had to use temporary classrooms while the new classroom addition was built, Arendall said everyone “just made it work.”
The new addition is now complete, adding 14 classrooms to the school.
With construction all around the school and moving trucks going back and forth across the district, teachers during the summer had to work at night because they couldn’t get into the school during the day.
The Dolly Ridge campus offers some amenities usually not seen at an elementary school because the campus, which was formerly Gresham Elementary School in the Jefferson County system, also served as a middle school. The campus has a full-size baseball field and a large gym.
The new building also serves as a FEMA-certified storm shelter and can be used by the community in the event of an emergency. The new addition also has a space for children with special needs who are in the life skills class, including a laundry room, a calm-down space and a sensory room.
A multipurpose room includes large boards that are attached to a movable wall that can divide the space as needed. Arendall said staff meetings are held in the room.
With all Vestavia elementary schools now on a K-5 format, Arendall said the older students at the Dolly Ridge campus have a chance to be leaders and model responsible behavior to the younger students.
The school also moved the playground, added new equipment and reworked the parking lot, though more parking is going to be added. Arendall said the new carpool system is going great. Parents picking up children present a barcode to be scanned, alerting students via a video screen inside that they should come outside to find their parents.
Arendall said the school’s library was in great shape, but there are plans to possibly expand it.
Each classroom has an active panel screen that teachers can use for educational purposes, helping the school’s 37 teachers have access to all they need to teach students, he said.
With construction finished, Arendall said school leaders spent the early part of the school year discussing procedures, and after that finished up, he was able to do what a principal usually does, visiting classrooms and meeting with teachers and students.
The community support has been fantastic, Arendall said. Just a month into the school’s existence, a check drive fundraiser brought in about $97,000, he said.
The “Dolly Ridge Dads,” fathers of students, had serve days on Saturdays during the summer, taking time to help set up the school, clean, deliver boxes and perform other tasks. Arendall said the school wouldn’t have been ready without their support.
“I don’t know of any community anywhere that could have pulled it off,” he said. “But it’s Vestavia.”
