New Heights Community Center Set To Open Next Week At Former Stillman Heights Elementary

TUSCALOOSA, AL — State and local education officials announced Friday that New Heights Community Resource Center will officially open on Wednesday, Jan. 18, at the former Stillman Heights Elementary.

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The new center will serve as a partnership between Tuscaloosa City Schools and local area nonprofits to help ensure the needs of TCS tudents, their families and the broader community are being met.

Located on 21st Street East, Stillman Heights Elementary closed in 2006, but has also been home to TCS’s alternative program, dubbed STARS Academy.

TCS says services provided by New Heights will have five areas of specific focus: education, homeless and homeless prevention services, youth services, mental health and healthcare.

Here are the first nonprofits to move into New Heights:

• Habitat for Humanity of West Alabama.
• The Literacy Council of West Alabama
• Disability Rights and Resources, Five Horizons Health
• PRIDE of Tuscaloosa
• The Kristen Amerson Youth Foundation
• Boys and Girls Clubs of West Alabama
• Parents as Teachers
• Tuscaloosa Reads
• La Fuerza Multicultural.

Apart from the nonprofits, New Heights will also feature a store of all new, donated items including clothes, toiletries, food and school supplies that TCS students will have access to when a need is identified by their school social worker. The store will be called "The Lift."

TCS Superintendent Mike Daria said a goal of the city school system is to educate the whole child and in order to ensure every child succeeds, TCS aims to remove certain barriers for students and their families."

“New Heights Community Resource Center has long been a dream," Daria said. "We are proud that this has come to fruition and will truly make an impact on our students and their families, with the vital work that our community partners do each and every day.”

Renovations to the former elementary school were first proposed in 2021 as a way to bring community services together and collaborate to make them more accessible, while also utilizing unused space in a building owned by the city schools. Other portion of the school were renovated last year turning former classroom space into offices.

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