Reeves gives update on district months into academic year
By DONNA THORNTON, Editor
Albertville City Schools Superintendent Bart Reeves provided Albertville Rotarians with a lot of facts and figures about the school system at a recent meeting.
With just more than three years as the district’s leader, he said it’s an honor and blessing to work with the people in the school district, from the school board to school personnel.
Reeves said it cost the school system a little more than $4.5 million per month to operate the schools from its general fund. Currently, the district has a reserve balance to run the system for 4.29 months.
The system has seven schools now after the addition of the second high school, Albertville Innovation Academy, two years ago, serving 5,327 students.
Reeves said when he first came to the system, the number of students was about 5,800. The numbers have dropped, and he talked about why.
“Enrollment is going down, and if you’ll notice the last couple of years it’s gone down significantly,” he said. “Some people will say well, that’s part of the administration, with President (Donald) Trump’s administration. But part of it is also us, Albertville City Schools.
“We dismissed 125 students two years ago that were out of district. Now why would you do that? Well, they were not providing value academically. They were not coming to school regularly. They were coming late to school. We had disciplinary reasons as well,” Reeves said, “so we dismissed those students.”
About 10 or 15 made their cases and were reenrolled. But each nine weeks, he said, those students’ attendance and behavior is monitored and if they check the boxes they can stay enrolled.
“Why would you continue allowing — let me say this, we love our out-of-district kids — but they’ve got to come in, they’ve got to behave, they got to do well. If they are not doing those things, why would we continue allowing them in allowing them to continue to negatively impact our state report card?
“The last two years, we’ve gotten very strict with our out-of-district kids,” Reeves said. Some other students have left, he said, whether because of deportations or immigration concerns. “You’ll see a 400-student drop in the last three years.
“We average 410 students per grade level,” he said. “Folks, that’s typically a school in the state of Alabama. They average 400 to 600 kids.”
Each of Albertville’s schools average 900 to 950 students. Class sizes are larger, he said, but the teacher-student ratio is not “out of control.” The district is able to use local funds to hire additional teacher units.
The superintendent outlined the roles of 623 full-time employees in the district:
Teachers: 359
Principals/assistant principals: 18
Counselors: 15
Librarians: 7
Other certified employees: 29
Support personnel: 195
Another 110 or 115 employees are contracted to work in the school system.
The district has 54 route buses that deliver 3,107 students to and from school. Reeves said 85% of those buses are 10 or less years old. He said adjustments this year to school start times have helped easy traffic slow-downs related to buses, and he expects that to improve more when the district adds an eighth school — a K-1 elementary school expected to start construction next year.
Reeves said one of the great benefits to Alabama schools in recent years is the Education Advancement & Technology Fund — one-time supplemental money that schools can use for repairs, deferred maintenance, capital outlay, classroom instructional supplies, insurance for facilities and transportation.
The funds for each system have varied through the years, with ACS’s highest funding coming in fiscal year 2025, with $6,331,994 provided. In fiscal 2026, the district received $4,994,078 in EAT funds. Reeves said the number has gotten smaller and smaller; he expects ACS to get about half what it got last year for fiscal 2027.
“That number is getting smaller because the economy is basically slowing down,” he explained. In the last couple of years the district has worked on HVAC repair, and bleacher replacement for football and basketball facilities, goal replacement, bus purchases.
“This money has been wonderful for the city of Albertville. If you do not spend it, you have to send it back to the state,” he said. “Trust me, we have been spending all of this each and every year.” The funding is expected to continue to decrease and probably go away in a few years.
The district is in the second year of a federal mental health grant for $3.5 million. The system contracts with Mountain Lakes and other vendors to provide mental health services for students.
Charting school academic achievements, Reeves said, you always want to see things moving in a northeasterly direction. Showing a slide to club members, he pointed out that ACS are doing that.
“Is it that northeasterly direction, based on the state assessment is it going as steep as we’d like for it to? No. But it’s getting there,” he said. Looking at prior years the system is making significant improvements in reading and math.
ACT scores have improved in every subject area from two years ago to last year, Reeves said, and with the help of the Albertville City Schools Foundation, the district is working to approve that.
In October, the district and foundation will pay for all juniors to take the ACT, months before they are required by the state to take it in March. The cost for the assessment is about $2,700, he said. In effect, it will give students a practice run at the ACT before March test.
In addition, the cost will be covered for sophomores to take the ACT in March as well, then again in October.
“What we see with the composite score on the ACT, it’s usually somewhere between a 2% and 4% bump,” Reeves said, with repeated testing. Scoring data can be used to focus attention on weak areas, he said, to further enhance the student scores.
Looking at the Albertville High School graduation rate, from 2024-25, it was 87.87% and this past year it was 93.28%. In AIA, it was roughly 98% in the last two years.
One of the graduation requirements is a college or career readiness indicator; for both AHS and AIA, that rate is 100%. “We’re doing an outstanding job there,” Reeves said.
Superintendent Bart Reeves of the Albertville City Schools tells Rotarians the district’s graduation rates and ACT scores are improving. DONNA THORNTON l The Leader
