PDF: David Brainerd Christian School Main Site

Students from the former David Brainerd Christian School came “by the droves” to enroll at the new East Hamilton School Tuesday as word spread that the private school had closed.

Pam Dantzler, principal of Hamilton County’s new public middle-high school, set to open in August, said her school already had enrolled about 50 of the Christian school’s roughly 200 students, and she expected more would come.

Still, she said, the news of the closure was sad.

“It is heartbreaking. It’s not what any educator wants,” she said. “I certainly don’t want to think that the opening of East Hamilton led to the closing of David Brainerd. That was never the intent.”

After an emergency meeting to inform faculty on Tuesday, an e-mail from David Brainerd Board Chairman Stephen Lepley and Headmaster Tom McCullough went out to parents. The independent Christian school’s enrollment peaked last year at 220 students, only about 140 said they planned to return for the 2009-2010 school year, Dr. McCullough said.

Staff File Photo The exterior of David Brainerd Christian School.

To try to prevent the closing, Dr. McCullough said he laid off several employees. Staffers also recently agreed to a 17 percent pay cut, he said, but that wasn’t enough to continue paying principal and interest on three building projects begun to meet the school’s once-growing enrollment.

“We borrowed to build ... and those payments required us to have so many students,” he said. “When our enrollment for next year just fell, in the long run, we realized we were not going to be producing enough revenue to sustain us.”

Dr. McCullough, 62, had been headmaster at the school for five years, and he said he held out hope until late Monday night that the closing could be avoided.

“It’s almost as if someone has died. We’re grieving,” he said.

When meeting earlier this year with parents thinking of taking their children out of David Brainerd and enrolling them in East Hamilton, Ms. Dantzler said she often had to have tissues on her desk because the decision to leave the private school was so emotional.

“None of (the parents) seemed to think the school wasn’t meeting their needs,” she said. “It was a gut-wrenching experience.”

Jeff Fountain said he was shocked when he learned Tuesday that his son, Tim, would have to attend another school for his sophomore year. A contractor, Mr. Fountain said it would have been a stretch for he and his wife, a math teacher at Chattanooga State Community College, to pay the school’s $9,200 yearly tuition, but they were planning to stay.

“We had high hopes that something would work out and the school could stay open,” he said. “We’ve just been extremely happy there.”

Middle school history teacher Deb Gruner has been at the school since it opened in 2002, and said the reality of the enrollment drop hit her several weeks before school let out this summer.

Ms. Gruner, one of 21 teachers left at David Brainerd, said she has no idea what she’ll do next year.

Many of Joey DeStefano’s friends and classmates talked last year about leaving David Brainerd for other schools, so he and his parents knew the school was in trouble.

They recently decided Joey would attend McCallie School next year.

“I’m gonna miss all my friends from school,” he said. “We were a tight family over there.”