Gov. Kay Ivey was joined this week by dozens of state lawmakers, Demopolis city leadership and health care experts as she signed into law a bill that will see the construction of a health care science school in Demopolis, a key priority of the governor since early last year.
“The return on the investment of this school will be better than any economic development project in the next 50 years,” Sen. Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro, long a champion of the project, said in a written statement.
First proposed by Ivey during her 2023 State of the State address, the school was pitched as a tool to help train and retain health care workers in the state, of which there remains a significant shortage. Ivey and lawmakers carved out some funding for the project in the legislative session that ended last week, but additional fundraising is needed, officials told Alabama Daily News on Wednesday.
Slated to be operational in the fall of 2026, the residential school will accept 9-12th grade students, and have a capacity for around 400 students. Students from across the state will be eligible to attend.
The school will offer a varied curriculum of STEM courses – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – as well as health care-based courses, and will operate in partnership with Whitfield Regional Hospital.
The bill Ivey signed Tuesday, House Bill 163, was sponsored by Rep. Cynthia Almond, R-Tuscaloosa, and included an allocation of $15 million toward the project in the $681 million supplemental education spending package lawmakers adopted last week.
That $15 million will be matched and then some thanks to a $26.4 million pledge toward the project made by Bloomberg Philanthropies, a pledge that was contingent on the state funding the project’s remaining costs.
The sizable pledge from Bloomberg Philanthropies came after an aggressive campaign from the Alabama School for Health Care Sciences Foundation, which was created for the sole purpose of securing independent funding for the project.
Rob Pearson, chair of the Alabama School of Healthcare Sciences Foundation, said the total cost of the project was estimated to be $65 million, which, coupled with the combined $41.4 million between the state and Bloomberg Philanthropies, left a hole of almost $24 million.
The remaining cost, Pearson said, will hopefully be raised by the foundation in the coming months.
“We’re not just resting on Bloomberg, we’ve got a long way to go there, so we’re going to continue those efforts,” Pearson told ADN.
“We may have a little debt involved in the beginning, but we’re not going to compromise on the quality of the school because it’s very important. If you’re going to send your high school kids here, we want them to be at a place that you’d be proud to be at.”
Pearson said that despite the budget shortfall, he and his team were still set on the school opening for the fall semester of 2026, and that he expected shovels to hit the ground on the project by October of this year.
After signing the bill into law, Ivey called the project the “most significant investment in West Alabama in decades,” and noted the arduous journey the project’s supporters had endured to see it become a reality.
Alabama lawmakers were initially hesitant to fully fund the project after first being proposed by Ivey last year, and instead commissioned a feasibility study to determine what the state’s return on investment might be, and where such a project would best be suited for.
After that study came back in support of approving the project in Demopolis, both Almond and Singleton filed bills to direct funding toward the school’s construction.
Reflecting on the task ahead of him and the foundation, Pearson said he and his team had a long journey ahead of them, but that they would do everything to see it through to the end.
“I’ve said to a number of people that this is just the beginning,” Pearson said.
“Our foundation needs to form a full board, the school needs a Board of Trustees, we need to hire a superintendent, and we need to hire a staff that will develop a complete curriculum. We need to build a building; it’s time to take this from concept to delivery.”