School Board Really Sorry About Central

The Guilford County Board of Education held a meeting at High Point Central High School on Monday, Oct. 29 to try to pacify angry parents after a second major delay of the $5.3 million project to renovate the High Point Central gym. Guilford County Board of Education Chairman Alan Duncan called the project a train wreck.

Duncan said, "It's particularly troublesome to watch this train wreck happen in slow motion."

It's hard to remember the school board being more apologetic.

Time and again, the school board members present said, "We're sorry," or, "I'm sorry."

Duncan and school board members Sandra Alexander, Paul Daniels and Darlene Garrett attended the meeting, along with Guilford County School Superintendent Mo Green. The school board holds such special meetings at schools when a particular situation has gotten so bad that parents can't be mollified with press releases.

The school board members had two barrels of complaints fired at them at the same time – complaints about the fact that two general contractors in a row haven't finished a $5.3 million project to renovate and expand the boys' varsity gym and make some repairs inside the school, and stronger complaints that High Point Central needs more space.

Duncan kicked off the apology-a-thon by acknowledging that the construction program at Central "has not gone as smoothly as people hoped it would go," and the apologies got more specific and more lavish as the night went on.

The meeting was held in the girls' gym – the old main gym in the main High Point Central building – which was fairly full, despite the fact that the school's Connect-ED robocaller was down the day before, preventing the school from calling most parents. That was the story, in any case.

The immediate reason for the meeting was to inform parents that, despite years of work and contrary to what they had been told for months, the gym won't be ready for use until at least January.

That's a hard blow to a family whose child is playing basketball. High school is short, and a lost season of at-home games can't be recovered.

High Point Central Principal Bob Christina did his best to make lemons out of lemonade, announcing that the school would, by the upcoming weekend, have the main gym floor adapted to be playable for practices – how was not made clear, as Price has reported that the floor has water underneath it as a result of the botched construction job.

Christina also announced, as if it were good news, that High Point Central has permission to use the Southwest High School gym for home games through Jan. 4.

"The most exciting piece is that we're going to High Point University on Nov. 30, and we're going to play High Point Andrews at High Point University's gymnasium," Christina said. "It's an opportunity for our kids to be in a collegiate atmosphere."

Christina said the Central-Andrews game will be run like a college game, with players' names and pictures thrown up on the Jumbotron. "We're moving in a positive direction," he said.

It's both nice, and smart PR, for High Point University President Nido Qubein to throw the university gym open for the big Central-Andrews game. But the overall package didn't leave parents beaming with joy at the "positive direction" in which the school was moving.

"We're grateful to get the new floor," said Theresa Franklin, a former co-president of the High Point Central Parent Teacher Student Association. "We hope it is improved. But it's frustrating to parents. We have lost students to other schools."

As for playing at Southwest, Franklin said the High Point Central team isn't welcome there. "They don't want us there," she said. "I've talked to parents, and they're like, 'You're going to be here again?'"

Carolyn York, whose daughter is on the girls' varsity basketball team, said her daughter is losing her motivation because of the loss of energy a team has when not playing at home. She said an opposing team at a game at Southwest dressed up in construction gear to mock the High Point Central team for not having a gym.

"The kids are the ones who are suffering," York said. "If this was a private-sector thing, it would have long ago been done."

But it's not a private-sector thing.

The current general contractor for the High Point Central project is KMD Construction LLC of Salisbury. The school board's architect for the project, HH Architecture of Raleigh, claims that numerous elements of the gym project are behind schedule and the gym will miss the Nov. 14 contract deadline. But the delay in the High Point Central project has been longer than that.

On Nov. 8, 2011, the school board voted unanimously to terminate its contract with Miles Builders of Charlotte, the main contractor on the High Point Central project, which had fallen more than a month behind. The school board claimed that Miles Builders has violated the contract in multiple ways, including falling months behind schedule and not paying subcontractors on time.

After bidding the project in February 2012, in April 2012, the bonding company on the project hired KMD to take over, and, in November 2012, a year after the school board fired Miles Builders, the job still won't be done on deadline.

Duncan said the bonding company still has control of the project. He said, in response to the complaints, that the project was now out of the school board's hands.

A bonding company provides insurance that a job will be done on time and well. If a contractor fails to live up to its timeline or contract, the bonding company takes over the construction project, hiring a new contractor if needed.

As Guilford County Schools Director of Construction Julius Monk said, "Unfortunately, it's a little bit different situation now that the bonding company is in charge of the project."

A delay by the second contractor on the project, combined with Guilford County Schools running up costs in working around the unfinished gym, makes it quite possible that the project will end up in a lawsuit between the school system and the bonding company – something Tom Smothers, the son of High Point Mayor Becky Smothers, pointed out.

Guilford County Schools is trying to get a reliable timeline for the project, and Duncan said the school board will communicate any further delays to the High Point Central community. He said, "We are very hopeful we don't have to communicate that any more."

Why Duncan said "any more" is a mystery. The school board hasn't been communicating with parents honestly throughout the construction project. On the High Point Central website, there are no updates on the project between a May 1, 2012 announcement of the KMD contract and a breathless Oct. 15, 2012 posting that High Point Central was super-duper excited that it wouldn't be playing its home games at home.

The school system's Nov. 8, 2011, press release about the delay was even more misleading – if only because the press release, which was full of bad news, was headlined, "High Point Central Ready for Basketball Season."

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Given the preeminence of basketball in North Carolina, the surprising thing about the meeting was that many, possibly a majority, of the questions were not about the gym at all. Numerous parents and teachers called for the school board to expand and repair High Point Central.

High Point resident Pam Greene told the school board members that many High Point Central parents want to jettison The Academy at Central to provide more space. The academy is in the Tomlinson building, the former Tomlinson Elementary School. Greene said that some students have free periods because there is no space for them to have classes.

"I think we have bigger issues that we need to address," Greene said. "I think our biggest issue is space. Our school can use much more space. All our teachers rotate in their classrooms."

Ann Byerly, who has taught at High Point Central for 20 years, said that ninth graders need more time before being integrated into the high school, and that Central needs a freshman academy. High Point Central used to have one, but former Superintendent Terry Grier changed it into The Academy at Central, a whole different school, to take the lowest-performing Central students so that their test scores and suspension statistics wouldn't affect High Point Central. Grier did it over the objection of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners and the principal of High Point Central.

"A freshman academy is what we need here again," Byerly said. "The freshman academy, when we had it here, was fabulous. When the kids were at the ninth grade academy in the old Tomlinson building, things went much more smoothly."

The school board is holding hearings on Nov. 5 at Page High School and Nov. 28 at Southwest High School, both at 7 p.m., to take public input on whether or not to continue to attempt to build its ill-fated "airport area high school" – a high school no one really wants and for which the school board hasn't been able to find land, or to spend that money fixing and expanding other schools.

If the school board doesn't build the airport area high school, it will have $70 million left over it could use to expand and repair older schools like High Point Central. Actually, it will have more than that, as it will have leftover money from many of the 27 projects that were on the project list for the 2008 school bonds – perhaps $140 million or more, although Duncan declined, when asked, to give an estimate of the size of the money pile the school board will have left over. At the school board's Sept. 22 retreat, he called it "a pretty significant amount."

That's if the Guilford County Board of Commissioners votes to sell the bonds intended for the airport area high school. Commissioners Bill Bencini and Bruce Davis attended the High Point Central meeting.

At the retreat, Facilities Department administrators gave the school board a 29-project priority list to upgrade, repair and equip schools to a common baseline that would cost $75 million, just a little more than the amount budgeted for the high school. High Point Central was not on the list.

The school board has already voted to spend $22.5 in leftover money.

"I would caution the public against looking at whatever is left of the $457 million that was approved by voters in 2008 as sort of residual money to be used where we want," said school board member Daniels. "The idea that we did good stewardship and came in under budget does not necessarily mean that the rest of that money will be available for use."

It's hard to imagine angry supporters of individual schools, many of whom have waited years for repairs, making the same argument at the upcoming hearings.