Harriman High School

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Harriman High School is a small, public high school located in Harriman, TN. Until 2003, it was part of the separate Harriman City School System -- a legacy of the city's founding as a planned community and "utopia" by northeastern prohibition leaders and the East Tennessee Land Company in the late nineteenth century. Harriman High is currently a member of the Roane County School System because taxpayers voted to stop paying for a separate system in the 1990s after three previous failed votes to surrender the system. Proponents of Harriman's separate system claimed the city long had better schools than its county neighbors; those in favor of surrender argued that the town's vanishing industrial base made paying for separate schools impractical.

As of 2006, the school had an enrollment of 353.

Harriman's mascot is the Blue Devil. Reportedly, an early member of the school board was an alumnus of Duke University, and used his alma mater's nickname for Harriman. The Blue Devils' historical rivals are the Yellow Jackets from Roane County High School in Kingston and the two share one of East Tennessee's oldest football rivalries -- with the game traditionally played the first week of the season. The games are often closely fought, although the much larger Kingston school has won every meeting since 1992.

Harriman High School is the alma mater of U.S. Olympic hurdler Sharieffa Barksdale (1984 Los Angeles Games) and former University of Tennessee football player Jermaine Copeland, who starred on UT's 1998 National Championship team.

Copeland led Harriman to a Class AA state basketball championship and an appearance in the Class AA state football title game -- in a time when Harriman was one of the state's smallest Class AA schools. It has since been dropped to Class A, the group of Tennessee's smallest public high schools.

Harriman's campus is located at the intersection of Georgia and Roane Streets and its athletic teams compete in Richard Pickell Gymnasium, on Wallace-Black Field, and Sharieffa Barksdale Track.