An alumni organization of the former Harriet Tubman High School says it opposes any expansion or external renovation of Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center, a homeless shelter near the school in Columbia.

Any construction to add beds at the shelter would impose on the Harriet Tubman school site, said Howard N. Lyles, chairman of the Harriet Tubman Foundation of Howard County Inc.

The addition of a second floor to the shelter was proposed last month.

The debate over the fate of the Tubman school, the first high school built for black students in Howard County, began in June when it was suggested as a possible home for a 24-hour crisis center that would house Grassroots, the Domestic Violence Center and the STTAR Center for victims of sexual abuse.

All three of these groups are nonprofit social service organizations whose activities are financed in part with county aid.

The school district land originally purchased for Tubman is home to Atholton High School and Grassroots, which has offered shelter services there for 14 years, said Executive Director Andrea Ingram.

The Tubman building is owned by the Howard school district and is used to house maintenance equipment as well as for a Head Start program. School officials have expressed a willingness to give up the building if other storage space is made available.

Members of the African-American community protested the suggested use of the school for the crisis center, saying they had plans to start a cultural center in the building.

"There's a deep sentimental, spiritual and certainly historical reason for them to retain Harriet Tubman," said Lyles, 68, of Clarksville.

Faced with strong opposition from the Tubman alumni, the coalition of nonprofit groups recently chose to give up on the school and to split the crisis center project.

On Nov. 21, Ingram announced a plan to concentrate services at the shelter's current location. The shelter would be renovated and a second story built to add 18 beds to the 32-bed facility.

Ingram said the added beds were needed because the shelter is forced to turn away many homeless people who apply for assistance. In October, the homeless shelter was forced to turn away 260 of 275 requests for shelter, she said.

Crisis center coalition representatives are considering other sites to house the counseling facilities and administrative offices of all three organizations, said Lynne Nemeth, coalition member.

"We're relinquishing any interest in the [Tubman] building," Ingram said. "We are really bending over backwards to accommodate everyone's needs here, but at some point it takes some willingness to work with us."

But the Tubman Foundation believes any expansion or construction of a second story at the homeless shelter would be unacceptable, Lyles said.

If plans for an African-American cultural center at Tubman go forward, the foundation "would be concerned as to what kinds of traffic ... and the type of people that would be housed in the Grassroots program," Lyles said.

He said residents of Simpsonville - the neighborhood surrounding Tubman - do not want more homeless people imported into their back yards.

"Certainly I see the Grassroots program as a necessity," Lyles said. "I see it as a shared type of program for the county, not to be dumped in one spot."

He said he was confident that county leaders would agree that the homeless shelter should not be expanded at its present location.

Neighbors "didn't want a high-rise building constructed within their sight," Lyles said. "It would change the aesthetics of the whole area."

Lyles said he was not suggesting that the existing homeless shelter move. He said his group has no thoughts about where additional homeless beds could be located.

Residents of three other Howard neighborhoods have vehemently protested efforts to move the crisis center, including the homeless shelter, to their communities.

The county has no likely surplus land to offer for either a Grassroots expansion or a crisis center headquarters, Howard County Executive James N. Robey said yesterday.