As a kid living in Frayser’s Greenbriar Apartments some 35 years ago, Sebastrian Morris first walked to school at Whitney Elementary. Later, he walked to Frayser High, once a long white building on its block of Dellwood Avenue. Speakers decorated with purple and gold bows carried Morris’ voice through the crowd gathered there at his alma mater on a Tuesday afternoon. Behind him, construction machinery idled on the vast lot where Frayser High School used to be. 

“This project is in the process of a renaissance,” Morris said. “It’s going to be a beacon for this community. Something that this community can be proud for.” 

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Morris is a civil engineering liaison for A2H, the firm that’s designing Frayser’s new high school. It’s not often that projects pop up in the neighborhood where he grew up on Madewell Street. 

That’s changed some with a slow roll of public investments in Frayser. 

“Frayser, you guys raised me,” Morris said, “and I’ve been made well.” 

But even the new high school Morris is working on has had a shaky future, beset by the pandemic and pressures to fund other projects. A clear funding path for the school eventually opened up last winter.

The official groundbreaking ceremony for the new, $112-million Frayser Community High School was a sunny sigh of relief. It could also be remembered as the milestone Memphis-Shelby County Schools has been seeking as its leaders work out the details of a major plan for closing and consolidating schools, as well as building more.

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Frayser high school’s future has been emblematic of those district plans in this way. After weeks of rescheduling for even the groundbreaking ceremony, officials brought out the ceremonial hard hats and shovels on Tuesday, April 1.

Two of the most ardent political supporters of the school couldn’t help but point out the day.

“This is serious right? Because I know it’s April 1,” said Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, who debuted the proposal five years ago before a pandemic and a rush of leadership tumult for the school system. “... This is the rebuild and transformation of Frayser, but this is also a moment, a forerunner, of things to come.” 

“We have had to postpone this day for many reasons, and it is befitting that we come here on April Fool’s Day,” said Memphis-Shelby County Schools Vice Chair Stephanie Love, who has represented Frayser residents on the school board for more than a decade. 

“... This is not just a groundbreaking to me. It is a homecoming. It is a celebration of love, labor and leadership,” said Love, who invited principals for all of Frayser’s schools to join her at the stage Tuesday.

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In 2020, the two high schools set to merge into the new Frayser building were amid changes: Trezevant High was recovering from a grading scandal and the old Frayser High had transformed into MLK College Prep as part of the state’s Achievement School District, a takeover intervention for chronically low-performing schools. 

Now, the ASD is nearly extinct, and students from MLK College Prep have merged into Trezevant. There, the school is in its final year of another state turnaround program that showed promising early results for students’ academic outcomes. 

“It shows that there’s revitalization and a new energy that’s going to be coming in a positive way to Frayser,” Terrence Brittenum, a network leader for MSCS, told The Daily Memphian. In his role, Brittenum oversees Trezevant High School, where he graduated as valedictorian in 1995. He said he expects students’ academic outcomes to also improve with the new building. 

MSCS interim Superintendent Roderick Richmond is a 1987 Trezevant grad. Richmond was among officials who pinned purple and gold bows to their lapels, a nod to Trezevant High’s colors at the old Frayser High site. 

“This new high school is more than bricks and beams,” Richmond said. “It is a symbol of beliefs. It reflects our unwavering commitment to every student, every family and every future that begins right here.” 

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Trezevant High’s Principal Eric Brent, Memphis Mayor Paul Young and Memphis City Councilwoman Michalyn Easter-Thomas also spoke at the groundbreaking, as well as Shelby County Commissioner Charlie Caswell. He wore a pair of shoes he said were meant to belong to Frayser Pastor Ricky Floyd, a beloved community figure who was fatally shot in March. 

The program began with a moment of silence for Floyd, whose death stunned Frayser and left a striking void. His funeral service on March 28 presented a final schedule conflict for the groundbreaking ceremony, which had once been scheduled for the same time. 

Pastor Sheila Floyd, Floyd’s widow, told the crowd about how much she remembered her husband walking the halls of the former Frayser High School. Their church had once been nearby. He’d come home, she said, frustrated at the school building’s deterioration. 

“Because this school is being erected now, this is a part of his prayer,” Sheila Floyd said. 

Trezevant, too, has long topped MSCS’ list of school buildings in need of upgrades. 

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Students are deserving of a new high school building, a first for the merged city-county MSCS, said Michelle Stuart, a longtime school district facilities official. 

“We must build on this momentum and continue improving and replacing buildings in all MSCS neighborhoods,” she told The Daily Memphian. 

Trezevant student JoNyia Mayes hosted the ceremony Tuesday. She’s a leader on the school’s media team, with aspirations to continue working in media and to open her own performing arts school.

As a senior, JoNyia won’t get to attend the new building as a student. 

“I’ll come back,” JoNyia said. 

“Maybe teach,” she added. “I do have a passion for education.”