Building
futures
When Rome City Schools Superintendent Lou
Byars took up that post in 2016, growth at Rome
High School started moving rapidly.
“We were growing at about 100 kids per year,”
he said. With that, there needed to be some sort of
expansion at Rome High School. The school board
wasn’t sure how until they came to a consensus
that the Career, Technical and Agriculture Education
program needed to be enhanced.
“In the last five or six years, we were around
1,600 students max at any given time,” he said. “We
were already pretty much full at the time.”
After taking a look around at some of the
makeshift classrooms for certain pathways at
70 OUTLOOK | APRIL 2020
the high school, they realized that they weren’t
designed to be used for pathways like audio-visual
production, engineering and JROTC.
“They were pretty much forced into these rooms.
We made it work,” Byars said.
One of the construction classes was put into
an old foreign language classroom, and one of the
healthcare classes was even crammed into an old art
room at the high school. That’s when they decided
that the best way to enhance the CTAE programs
for the better would be to use the next education
local option sales tax to build a College and Career
Academy.
“We needed to give our kids more opportunities,”
By Kenya Hunter
Students and school board members break ground at
Rome High School’s college and career academy site.