Fulton County Schools opened its newly consolidated Teaching Museum & Archives inside the former Spalding Drive Elementary School building off Brandon Mill Road in central Sandy Springs this month, welcoming its first classes on October 1. The district says the site now draws roughly 58,000 students a year for exhibit-based programming, but members of the parent group that fought to save the school as a neighborhood campus say the new use feels like a slap in the face.
The building has become a flashpoint since the Fulton County Board of Education voted 4-3 on February 20, 2025, to permanently close Spalding Drive Elementary along with Parklane Elementary in East Point, as Patch reported at the time. District policy treats elementary campuses with fewer than 450 students as operationally inefficient, and Spalding Drive had fallen to 349 students in the fall of 2024, a threshold that triggered the closure review, according to 11Alive. Hoodline documented the grassroots pushback that followed, when parents in Sandy Springs and East Point held joint rallies against the proposed shutdowns in earlier coverage.
According to Rough Draft Atlanta, the district has completed the first of three planned phases at the site, with a phased expansion into available space still to come. Museum coordinator Amanda Smith told the outlet the museum is expanding its programming beyond pre-K through fifth grade, with eighth graders and high school students set to begin visiting starting in February 2027.
Murals, Dioramas and a Preserved 1960s Classroom
Inside, the building's hallways now feature murals depicting Georgia's natural habitat and wildlife, its history, and the Sandy Springs community, per the outlet's report. The museum also displays Spalding Drive Elementary memorabilia and has preserved a 1960s-style Spalding Drive classroom. Exhibits cover World War II, Georgia geography, Anne Frank, the Creek and Cherokee, Eva Thomas, and the American frontier, alongside Untying the Knot, which documents firsthand accounts of public school integration in Fulton County.
Janet Arias, the school's former assistant principal who now serves as assistant principal at Heards Ferry in south Sandy Springs, described the school's transformation as beautiful. She said some of the exhibits were higher quality than those in some museums she had visited, and she was glad the building would continue to be used to teach children.
Irene Schweiger, executive director of the Sandy Springs Education Force, is looking to partner with the teaching museum for her nonprofit's after-school programming. District 7 board member Michelle Morancie, who represents north Sandy Springs and east Roswell, posted a Facebook message on October 14 lauding the new space, a post that drew 33 comments.
Parents Say the Museum Mocks Their Fight
Raymond Grote, board chair of the Save Spalding Committee, said his community has an extremely negative view of the district's new use for the building. “The whole thing is basically an adult diorama,” Grote said, calling the museum a waste of taxpayer money given the district's financial strain and its tax increase plans. He said his children described their teaching museum field trips as boring and the worst field trip two years in a row, and that children cried over the district's decision to send them on the trip. Fulton County Schools sent Woodland Elementary students among the first groups to visit the museum.
The Save Spalding Committee's frustration traces back to a financial decision the district made in May 2025, when it rejected a $10 million offer from the group to purchase the building, opting instead to centralize its dispersed teaching museums and district archive at the site, according to Rough Draft Atlanta. Before that consolidation, the district operated two separate facilities, Teaching Museum North on Mimosa Avenue in Roswell and Teaching Museum South on North Avenue in Hapeville, per Fulton County Schools Archives records. The committee pressed on after the rejection, and on July 29 the State Charter Schools Commission of Georgia approved its petition to open Spalding Academy, a K-8 public charter school set to launch in Sandy Springs in fall 2027.
Mayor Questions Capital Spending Ahead of Tax Vote
Sandy Springs Mayor Rusty Paul said a teaching museum may not be the best and highest use of the school building when parents in the community wanted a charter school there instead. Paul argued the district faces a tough sell to the community on the countywide E-SPLOST, the one-penny sales tax for education. “If you close schools, why do you need capital funds to build new schools?” Paul said, according to the seed reporting.
The remark lands as Fulton County voters prepare to decide on November 3 whether to reauthorize the 1% Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax for five more years, a measure aimed at raising up to $1.306 billion for the district's Capital Plan 2032 projects, per Fulton County Government. It also follows the Fulton County Board of Education's tentative adoption this month of an 18.08-mill property tax rate, a full mill above last year's 17.08 rate and the district's first tax increase recommendation in seven years, as reported by Rough Draft Atlanta. Hoodline previously calculated that the proposed rate exceeds the state rollback rate by 3.08%, adding roughly $91 a year in school district taxes for a home valued at $425,000.
Morancie, who voted against closing Spalding Drive, acknowledged during her May 2026 reelection campaign that the district was actively working to rebuild community trust in Sandy Springs following the closure controversy, according to SaportaReport. For families like Grote's, that trust-building effort now runs through a museum they never wanted, even as the district's new charter alternative prepares to open its own doors next fall.
