Harriman High School

Harriman High School is a small, public high school located in Harriman, Tennessee, operated by the Roane County School System. As of 2006, the school had an enrollment of 353.

Until 2003, Harriman High School was part of the separate Harriman City School System, which was a legacy of the city's founding in the late nineteenth century as a planned community and "utopia" by temperance movement leaders from the northeastern U.S. and the East Tennessee Land Company. Harriman High came under the authority of the Roane County School System when taxpayers voted to stop paying for a separate system in the 1990s. Three previous votes on the topic had failed 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.

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.

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 also has a long standing rivalry with Rockwood High School. The two schools have played each other in football every year since 1921, reportedly the longest continuous series in Tennessee.^[3]

Notable alumni

Harriman High School is the alma mater of:

• U.S. Olympic hurdler Sharieffa Barksdale (1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games)

• Former University of Tennessee football player Jeremaine 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 during a time when Harriman was one of the state's smallest Class AA schools. It has since been dropped to Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association Class A, the group of Tennessee's smallest public high schools but still tha Best.!

• Notable Physician and Medical Journal Editor (Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction) E.Scott Sills

References