Will Hamilton County Commissioner Tim Boyd be the passionate champion for a centralized vocational high school as his general election opponent Kenny Smith has been for the past 15 years, or will he become just another voice in a nearly 25-year parade of people who suggested students have needed such an option since the closing of Kirkman Technical High School in 1991?
Time will tell.
Boyd, who said little about the need for such a school in an editorial board meeting with the Times Free Press before May's primary election, now maintains the system needs a place for students who won't seek a four-year college degree but who are needed by local industries to fill jobs they're currently unable to fill.
Such a school, he said, could be built for $15-$18 million at Chattanooga State Community College.
Before the Residence Inn, Hilton Garden Inn and Imax 3D Theater replaced Kirkman Tech, and before the school's football field was replaced by AT&T Field, people were calling for a school on the CSCC campus, according to Times Free Press archives.
"When Kirkman Technical School was closing," former Hamilton County Mayor Dalton Roberts wrote in 2012, "Chattanooga Mayor Gene Roberts and I presented this plan to city school Superintendent Harry Reynolds."
Reynolds at the time said the die had already been cast in moving many of the Kirkman programs to Howard High School.
"With respect for all who have done their best to create something special at Howard," Roberts wrote, "to think a vocational school could be superimposed on that high school operation was the most foolish education decision ever made in local education."
By 2001, even before then-Superintendent Jesse Register convinced area educators a single-track diploma standard was the way to go and before he decentralized vocational education programs, Kenny Smith knew he was fighting an uphill battle.
"Parents don't want their kids to be electricians," said the then and current training director with Hamilton County International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
Instead, educators said, vocational programs had been seen as dumping grounds for students with behavior problems or different learning needs.
By the mid-2000s, the shift to dispersed vocational academies had begun, a result of work toward a more personalized high school experience as suggested by the Carnegie initiative, an $8 million grant awarded to Hamilton County to craft high school reform, said Sheila Young, assistant superintendent at the time. But the idea never caught fire.
When Smith ran for the District 8 Board of Education seat in 2006, he continued to press the need.
"I have a college degree and an electrical apprentice certification," he said. "I know both are important, but we need to prepare kids [who are not going to college] for jobs."
Two years later, still before the devastation of the Great Recession, Smith felt vocational education wasn't being given its due. By then, he'd been elected to the school board and become its chairman.
"I don't know how the administration will feel about it, but I almost don't care," he said. "They still think of career and technical as a dumping ground."
He found support in fellow members Chester Bankston and Rhonda Thurman.
"I love it," Bankston, an electrician, said of the possibility of a vocational school. He added anecdotally that because Hamilton County couldn't produce even half of the 500 electricians for construction then starting on the Watts Bar nuclear unit, the rest had to be hired elsewhere.
The recession, which permanently eliminated some jobs, allowed businesses to see they could function with fewer employees and forced other workers into part-time employment, pointed up the value of vocational jobs.
By 2009, Smith had advocates in City Judge Russell Bean and then-City Councilman Jack Benson for the idea at Chattanooga State.
At the time, Sequoyah, the county's technical high school in the north end of the county, had fewer than 350 students in a building designed for 1,135.
Smith then pushed a vocational school in his first race with Boyd for County Commission and pitched it to the school board after his defeat, first suggesting a charter and then a magnet school on the CSCC campus. Chattanooga State President Jim Catanzaro was all for it, he said.
In last month's rematch with Boyd, he said that "without training, [area students] won't be ready" for the technical jobs in today's world.
Even state House candidate Patsy Hazlewood touched on the subject, explaining that local employers had told her that they couldn't find enough properly trained workers from the area to take jobs that are available.
But it's Boyd who was the winner in August and now has put forth the idea. Again, Catanzaro supports it. Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Rick Smith and Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger didn't exactly give the idea ringing endorsements but didn't dismiss it, either. Smith suggested whoever proposes it will have to "bring some money to the table." In turn, Boyd says he wouldn't mind pitching it to businesses.
Well, commissioner, the ball's in your glove. Start pitching. Students and area businesses await you.