Moore County school system administrative staff and members of the Board of Education’s Facilities Planning Committee spent the better part of two long afternoons last week trying to find the best sets of solutions on a facilities plan to present to the full board at Monday night’s meeting.
“This is where we’ve narrowed it down to,” said board member Bruce Cunningham, chairman of the committee. “So I think we’re talking about a preliminary report on Monday of where we’ve gotten.”
The entire committee stressed during the meetings that the plan must meet the projected needs through 2015.
As of Friday, the committee had been considering constructing new pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade schools in each of the three attendance areas of the county. Those are needed to ease overcrowding at existing schools and accommodate projected enrollment increases.
Additions to existing schools have been suggested by the staff and public to ease crowding. The problem is most acute at Sandhills Farm Life Elementary and Pinehurst Elementary schools.
The year-round school at Academy Heights would move to a renovated Pinehurst Elementary campus.
The possibility of adding a separate sixth-grade academy is also an option being discussed. The plan would be to separate the sixth-grade students from the rest of the middle school students into a focused community to help ease students’ transitions from elementary to middle school.
The plan calls for a separate building with its own smaller media center, guidance and administrative offices and dining room on the existing campus.
For the high schools, the staff recommended building a new campus in a location to be determined that would have about 1,200 students. That is similar to what the public recommended through the steering committee.
The high school could serve as a magnet or technical education campus, which would also alleviate the crowding at Union Pines and Pinecrest High schools. If career technical educator (CTE) programs are moved to the new campus, Pinckney Academy would return to its original use as an alternative school.
The other option suggested by the Central Office staff would be to construct additional space at the existing high schools to create smaller learning environments, similar to the sixth-grade academy at the middle-school level.
Eight of the 22 public schools in the county are already above capacity, and 14 are projected to be above capacity in 10 years.
The board will receive a condensed version of the recommendations made by both the staff and community at its meeting Monday at 7 p.m.
The final plan will not be set in stone until the board has time to carefully consider all options, a process that could stretch into the spring.
“You sleep on it and you ponder on it,” Cunningham said.
Funding will also be a major issue. Cost estimates are still being refined for the various options.
Joe Vaughn, member of the Facilities Committee, said the school board needs to present a united front when it goes to the commissioners to ask for funding amd to ask the public to support the plan.
School Board Chairman Charles Lambert said public input was extremely valuable in the process.
Three site meetings and two community dialogues were held.
“If we don’t go exactly the way they want to, we want to let them know why,” Lambert said.
The school system’s administrative staff reviewed the public’s recommendations and then added its analysis of what might be best when considering school programs, state policies, curriculum, students with special needs, administrative space, transportation and other issues the public could not fully take into account.
“You always want to overbuild, within limits, your core facility, because it’s easy to build additional classrooms,” said Dr. Larry Upchurch, assistant superintendent.
Caroline Kornegay can be reached at 693-2484 or by e-mail at ckornegay@thepilot.com.
