Major Growth for Metro Nashville Public Schools

The 2023-24 school year is just beginning, but expansion and addition have been on the minds of Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) for much longer.

Two new schools — one high school and one elementary school — just opened?this fall, with several more projects on the horizon,?all to provide outstanding educational opportunities for the families moving to Middle Tennessee.

James Lawson High School is opening its doors on a 307,000-square-foot campus in Bellevue and?Goodlettsville Elementary School is re-opening after the former campus was deconstructed. Budgets for the two schools were $124 million and $22.86 million, respectively.

The 1,600-student high school is named for Rev. James Lawson,?known for his Civil Rights work in the 1960s to coordinate the sit-ins that desegregated the lunch counters in downtown Nashville and his national leadership alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?Rev. Lawson was the first-ever recipient of Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Distinguished Alumni/ae Award. It features a?1,600-seat gymnasium, a 500-seat theater and auditorium, expansive classroom space, as well as a collection of facilities for sports teams and various arts groups.

Goodlettsville Elementary likewise has several exciting features, including playgrounds for its pre-K and K-5 students, sensory areas and a slide from the second floor of its classroom wing down to the Grand Hall on the ground floor. The school also has taken steps to reduce traffic via separate access points for cars and buses, while also focusing on a substantial reduction of utility costs by installing a geothermal heating and cooling system.

MNPS will also be completing a 24-classroom expansion at Cane Ridge High School in Antioch later in the school year. Aimed at managing projected growth in student enrollment, the project will focus not only on growing the total classroom capacity but also on upgrading the technology capabilities of the building existing classrooms.

Four more projects are in the design phase, with three projected to be completed in the next two years and the fourth still pending an estimated finish date.