School facilities study

Recommendations from comprehensive school facilities study still under consideration

Information for this article was obtained from the Guilford County Schools’ website as well as other sources According to a year-long comprehensive facilities study paid for by the Guilford County Board of Education and the Board of County Commissioners, building new schools, making needed repairs to aging systems, bringing all schools up to standard, eliminating the backlog of deferred maintenance and providing adequate funds for preventive and ongoing maintenance for school and support facilities will cost more than $6.9 billion over the next 30 years.

But for now, an estimated $1.5 billion doled out in four phases could suffi ce to bring all the school buildings in the district up to new or like-new condition by 2038.

The school board and the commissioners received the fi nal results of the school district-wide facilities and boundary optimization study at a special meeting last January.

The $899,635 study by MGT Consulting Group examined the district’s long- and short-term facility needs to serve more than 73,000 pre-K-12 students.

While addressing facility shortcomings the report also identifi es areas where the district could more effi ciently utilize space.

School and district buildings were assessed, scored and ranked based on the overall condition of the facility,

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educational suitability for 21st-century learning, technology infrastructure and site, including age of facility infrastructure, quantity and size of appropriate academic and support spaces, and space utilization compared to short- and long-term student enrollment projections. These scores then were combined into one rating that was used to rank and prioritize schools by need by level (elementary, middle and secondary).

Per the study, almost half of the district schools, particularly at the elementary school level, received unsatisfactory or poor ratings. Schools received some of the lowest scores for educational suitability, which indicates whether the facility and technology support current academic standards and instructional strategies. Facilities for maintenance, transportation and administration also received low ratings.

Fall 2019 “I visit schools and classrooms every week, and I have seen for myself how our aging and often dilapidated buildings and inadequate instructional technology are hampering the work of our educators and holding our students back in comparison to what school districts are providing students nationally,” said Superintendent Sharon L. Contreras. “21st century learning requires new ways of designing and building schools and classrooms.”

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referring to N.C. 68. “All the churches would bring their candidates for baptism” to be dunked in the water. The mill was a gathering place for farmers who brought their grain to be ground into food for their tables and livestock. As they waited, they fi shed in the creek. Children walked on top of the pipe that carried water from the pond to the wheel that turns the grist stones.

Joseph Gorrell Pierce said his great-great uncle spent the night on the property in the late 1800s. He carried legally made liquor from Belews Creek to Greensboro where U.S. inspectors collected excise taxes on it. “It was a good place to stop,” Pierce said. The water that turned the wheel served other purposes. It fi lled barrels for farmers to irrigate their gardens and tobacco fi elds. Oak Ridge’s fi re department fi lled its tanker trucks from the mill pond. Firefi ghters used the rush of water to clean the soot and grit from hoses after fi res, recalled Ted Wright, a retired school teacher and former fi reman.

Hampton Atkins, of Colfax, recalled collecting sand from along the creek and selling it for making mortar Photos by Chris Burritt/NWO Annie Laura Perdue (left) trained to be a miller at Old Mill of Guilford under former miller/owner Charlie Parnell. Old Mill of Guilford owner Amy Klug (right) listens as Perdue tells of a creek where moonshiners made illegal liquor during Prohibition and other stories about the mill off ered by those who gathered there one afternoon in mid-September.

for new houses.

“We loved to live here,” said Ruby Cole, despite a scary memory when her family owned the mill and they lived in the adjacent house. One of her duties was calling her father for lunch.

He was often working upstairs, requiring her to climb steps that were so shaky that she said she crawled up them instead of walking.

“I was scared to death,” she said. Cole recalled another job: helping her brothers and sisters collect corn cobs to burn in the fi replace of their home. Dorothy Anderson said her family lacked a scale in their home, giving her father an idea.

“When he was coming to the mill, he would bring us to weigh us,” she said.

Bill Donnell remembered fi shing on Saturdays and working in the mill in the 1950s. When he and his brother weren’t busy twisting copper wire to secure the bags of fl our, they perched in upstairs windows and shot snakes and rats, he said.

“When we were kids, raised around here, the mill was an integral part of our childhood,” Donnell said. “It has changed around here, but the mill will be in our history a long, long time.”

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“Updates have been made with a limited operations/ facility budget, which has affected the district’s ability to keep up with the rising costs of maintaining their asset portfolio,” the report said.

Balancing capacity in densely populated areas and rural areas is another challenge the district faces. In many cases, schools that are overcrowded are located in diff erent communities and geographic areas than schools that are underutilized. The report also noted that magnet and option schools are not distributed equitably across the county.

Potential solutions off ered by the consulting fi rm include building new schools, repurposing some school buildings, and adjusting and consolidating some schools and school boundaries. However, these are recommendations only.

“While there aren’t any real surprises, the study provides a useful framework and has identifi ed some of the areas of greatest need,” said Deena Hayes, chair of the county’s Board of Education. Pearce Elementary; 65 students from Summerfi eld Elementary and 150 students from Oak Ridge Elementary. The study also recommends assigning 170 students from Northwest Middle School to Kernodle Middle School and 150 students from Northern Middle School to Northeast Middle School. No student assignment changes are recommended for Northern Guilford High School, but to address the needs of Northwest Guilford High School, the district’s most overcrowded school, the study recommends assigning 600 students to Western Guilford; to accommodate the additional students and address existing needs, Western would undergo a $45 million renovation, which would include a $14 million addition.

No action has been taken on the study’s recommendations, but a joint committee of the Guilford County School Board and County Commissioners met in March to discuss the report. The committee recommended conducting another study that would look at school boundaries, and repurposing some underutilized magnet schools as well as adding new choice option schools. Guilford County voters last approved a school facilities bond in 2008. The last school construction project using money from that $457 million bond will be completed this year.

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 Workday  Vacation  Holiday  First/last day for students  Mandated work day  Inclement weather make-up day

Your Guilford County real estate experts

the Bobbie Maynard Team

Bobbie Maynard (336) 215-8017 bobbie.maynard@allentate.com

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Walt Maynard (336) 215-9767 walt.maynard@allentate.com

To address future needs of schools in northwest Guilford County, the study’s recommendations include building a new elementary school to accommodate 500 students and adjusting the boundaries of Colfax Elementary to assign 100 students to the new school; 160 students from

want to view the complete report? The summary facilities report and school-by-school analyses are available at www.gcsnc.com; enter “facilities report” in the search bar.

Kelli Young (336) 337-4850 kelli.young@allentate.com

Scott Aldridge (252) 531-7456 scott.aldridge@allentate.com

Steve Scott (336) 772-7430 steve.scott@allentate.com