Gainesville students are preparing to be back in class for a new school year, and school systems have been planning how to improve.
Gainesville City students will be back in class on Tuesday and administrators with the system have provided updates on new things students will see.
The Gainesville City School System has invested nearly $100 million in improvements across its campuses over the past three years due to funding from ESPLOST-6, according to Gainesville City Schools Superintendent Jeremy Williams.
Gainesville High School will be debuting a new academic building that will give students a central location for classes.
“When I got here, we had 14 buildings at the Gainesville High School campus,” Williams said. “Now going into next year, we will have eight.”
The high school will now have about 100 more parking spaces and students will no longer have to walk up the hill to the ninth-grade center.
Williams said that Gainesville has nearly 1000 employees serving 8250 students. The system has hired 142 new people to fill various positions.
Gainesville students are provided with tools to help them deal with the stresses of school and growing up.
“We have done a great job of making our support more robust. We do have school counselors, but we also have five social workers,” Williams said. “And now we have five mental health clinicians.”
Kindergarten through eighth-grade students no longer need to worry about getting school supplies.
“As a Title One school, we provide everything that every student needs, as far as school supplies go,” Director of Communications Joy Griffin said. “Each student can come to school, knowing that they have what they need to be successful in the classroom.”
Additionally, Griffin said Middle and High school students do not need to carry around heavy books.
“The need for school supplies has changed with the digital age, especially for our middle school and high school students,” Griffin said. “A lot of that is just done with their Chromebooks. And we are a one-to-one school district where every student has a Chromebook.”
Gainesville City Schools administration said they are looking forward to a great year of academics and athletics.
