Brady Flanigan
Editor
We were standing in the parking lot of a dusty construction site, nothing but cracked clay beneath the morning sun, wearing safety equipment and discussing hermeneutics.
“I know it’s a Christian school, but what church is it associated with?”
“None,” he said, “non-denominational. Our spiritual beliefs are the things most all Protestants agree to—who Jesus is, the Trinity. We don’t have anything in there about baptism or things where people will have a difference of opinion. We just want to teach kids the basics everyone agrees on, and let them go home or to church and branch off.”
9:30 a.m., Tuesday, Aug. 19—at the construction site of the new Cooper Christian Academy—Hwy. 41A, Shelbyville, Tennessee. Hiding in a sliver of shade thrown from the site’s mobile field office was its founder, Barry D. Cooper, scrolling on his rubber-wrapped iPad. Former Cooper Steel CFO, inheritor of the family legacy. In 2022 Cooper took his retirement money and passion for Christian education and turned it into a school.
We had gathered to see the erection of Cooper Christian’s new bell tower. The tower stands as the centerpiece of the private school’s new 85,000 square-foot site plan. The tower is an unexpected piece of architecture for a southern, private, Christian school. Legacy private schools in the South are designed, almost as if by intention, to be microcosms of the campuses of New England’s Ivy League. They’re shifty places with winding paths and tall trees for picturesque blanket-studying and neoclassical buildings chiseled from stone, inscribed with Latin aphorisms and the names of dead donors.
Cooper Christian’s architecture is too young for that. The architecture is abnormally contemporary—boxy, neomodernist and wrapped in prefab gunmetal paneling. Built from steel instead of marble.
The tower stands alone, 80 feet high, in front of what will become the entrance. Constructed from Cooper Steel I-beams, half covered and half exposed, it’s deconstructivism meets private Christian education. The bell is one piece of solid bronze, forged in a foundry over 100 years ago.
Right now the academy only has bones. It’s positioned on the south side of Shelbyville, behind a diner called Happy Times. Look and you’ll see an iron latticework two-stories high, a concrete floor, and now, a tower.
Construction is set to finish in May 2025, just in time for the fall semester. Currently the school is K–4, operating out of rented space at First Christian Church. Its move to the new campus will add a fifth grade, with classrooms capped at 15 students each. “That’s a good academic environment,” Barry Cooper said. “A lot better than 25, you know?”
The school has been built to expand, but Cooper insists growth will come one grade at a time. “We’re not going just because we got space,” he said. “We don’t want to bring in a bunch of eighth graders into our situation. We want to grow ’em into it.” Phase one is designed for about 190 students. A second phase exists only on paper—six classrooms, a lab, a gym, maybe a band room—but Cooper hedged. “We may not need it. We just don’t know what we’re gonna encounter. We’re flexible.”
That flexibility extends to enrollment. He knows some parents will eventually trade Cooper Christian for Webb, the Bell Buckle prep school that begins at sixth grade and charges more than twice the tuition. “Some people value the academic part of it more than they value the Christian part of it,” he said. “If people are here for the Christian part, we’ll keep ’em. If they’re here for the academic part and the Christian’s just sort of a throw-in in their mind, then we may lose some of ’em when…sixth grade. Right. But we don’t know. We’re flexible and we’ll see what we get.”
For now, flexibility means patience: a school that will, in Cooper’s words, “organically grow into it,” not one that tries to fill every grade the moment space allows.
The tower itself arrived all at once, hauled in on a flatbed and set by crane. Workers bolted the frame into place in less than an afternoon, leaving it to rise above the empty lot like a finished piece waiting for the rest of the building to catch up.
From the diner parking lot beside it, the skeleton of Cooper Christian looks less like a campus than a promise. Whether it grows into a fixture or fades into the shuffle of Middle Tennessee’s private school market will depend on the same thing Barry Cooper repeats about his tower: timing, patience, and the willingness to see what takes root.