Parents Weigh In On School Spending

The Guilford County Board of Education – its plans for a $72 million airport area high school having imploded – on Monday, Nov. 5 switched to trying to sell Guilford County citizens on the idea of using the $72 million as a pool of money to repair and expand existing Guilford County Schools.

In a public forum in the auditorium of Page High School, the school board tried to explain how it got in a $72 million mess and the options for using the money. "Money" is an exaggeration, because the $72 million is part of $457 million in school bonds approved by voters in May 2008. The bonds that would provide the money for the high school have not been sold by Guilford County.

The forum began with Guilford County Schools Chief Information Officer Terrence Young telling the audience that he was going to attempt to explain "how we ended up where we are" – never a good sign.

Young's job was to try to simultaneously justify the decision to build what was originally an $80 million high school, the school board's failure to do so, and the desire of the Guilford County Schools Facilities Department to latch onto the $72 million and use it for fixing Guilford County public schools that have been allowed to decay, while the school system was spending astronomical amounts on building new and renovating old schools

School board Chairman Alan Duncan said repeatedly that the school board has not decided what to do about the airport area high school, which was intended to be the gem of the half-billion-dollar building program. And the paperwork Guilford County Schools handed out listed numerous options.

The airport area high school, as described on the project list, would have been a 1,200-student school expandable to 1,400 students, would have included the purchase of between 105 and 150 acres for the high school and for a future airport area middle school, the construction funds for which were not on the project list. The school board tried to purchase two properties for the schools, but was prevented by opposition from High Point and Kernersville, respectively.

The future options for the failed high school/middle school project, according to the school system's handouts, include building a smaller high school; searching for separate, smaller properties for the high school and middle schools; buying land for the middle and high schools but building neither; changing the target location for the schools; building a middle school instead of a high school; and placing both the high school and middle school projects on hold.

The handouts included numerous enrollment projection charts to justify the school board's decision to build the high school and its likely decision to cancel it. Short version: The enrollment in Guilford County high schools had increased by more than 1,000 a year before the crash of 2008, but since then the yearly increase has dropped to a few hundred and shows no sign of returning to its previous levels.

That leaves the school board with a planned high school with no constituency or $74 million in mad money ($72 million for the high school and its land and $2 million for the land for the future middle school) – minus the $3 million it has already spent on the high school project.

After the school board closes out the other 25 projects on the list for the 2008 school bonds, it will have much more than $74 million left over, once you figure in leftover money from completed projects, the budgets for which were substantially padded. Say $140 million as a working number. The school board will take the first $22.5 million in spending of the leftover money to the Guilford County Board of Commissioners on Nov. 15, 2012 for approval.

Duncan said, "Which is not going to be all the savings at the end of the day."

In other words, the school board is going to have oodles of money left over and is trying to decide where to spend it. If the audience at Page was any indication, most parents want the money spent at schools their children already attend.

That seemed to be the point of Young's presentation anyway. The airport area high school was intended to absorb new students that would have otherwise gone to Northwest High School, Southwest Guilford High School and Western Guilford HIgh School – but as Young said, enrollment at those schools has leveled out.

Young said, "While some of our schools, yes, they do exceed the capacity of our designs, the excess is not significant."

It's an admission the school system did not make during its long effort to find land for the airport area high school.

The $22.5 million the school board will try to get the commissioners to approve on Nov. 15 is part of $75 million in repairs and expansions the Facilities Department has identified to spend in the first round of leftover money from the 2008 school bonds, and part of $1.2 billion Guilford County Schools claims it will need in upcoming years. Where that money will come from if the economy doesn't improve is anybody's guess, as no one expects Guilford County voters to approve a new round of school bonds anytime soon.

If the school board was hoping for an army of supporters to take in front of the Board of Commissioners, either to support building the high school or to support spending the high school money on maintenance, the audience, although it leaned toward fixing current schools, was split.

Paul Ingram of Greensboro told the school board members that the way to alleviate crowding at Northwest and Southwest high schools was to renovate and expand Western. He said the principal of Western, Pete Kashubara, has done a good job of increasing test scores at Western, and that Western has the physical space to expand by adding classrooms. He said that Western has only one mobile building, which is used for physical education.

Ingram also said that Guilford County Schools owns 10 acres adjacent to Western, and that there is more adjacent land that could be bought for an expansion. He said that Western has good traffic access, but has an undersized gym, auditorium and cafeteria.

"These issues really need to be addressed, but we could also add more classroom space," Ingram said. "I don't necessarily see an overcrowding problem at Western Guilford, but I do see ones at Northwest and Southwest."

Ingram also said that the stadium and the restrooms and concession stands at the softball and soccer fields at Western are not handicapped accessible.

Ingram's comments show a way out of the slight crowding at Northwest and Southwest. But they also show the problem that the school board is already facing – that many Guilford County Schools need improvements, and the inboxes of school board members are already filling up with requests for improvements at specific schools, many of them unrelated to the Northwest-Southwest-Western brouhaha.

At the school board's September retreat, the school board voted to spend $15 million of what will almost certainly be a much larger amount of money left over after the school board is done with the projects promised to voters in 2008. The school board instructed Guilford County Schools Facilities Department administrators to come back with a recommendation on how to spend the money.

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The administrators, for their part, came up with 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, and the school board is going to have millions more left over – "a pretty significant amount," Duncan said. A quick envelope-back calculation suggests that the amount left over will be something in the neighborhood of $150 million. More precise figures will develop as the school board closes out more projects.

The school board has already voted to increase the amount of money to be spent from closed-out projects from $15 million to $22.5 million.

On the one hand, the school board has parents who want the $74 million on the project list for the airport area middle and high schools to be spent on other schools. On the other hand, it has critics who say that, since voters approved the bonds based on the promise of a high school, it should be spent on the high school – or that the bonds should not be sold, and the money shouldn't be spent at all.

School board critic Joe Stafford – who school board member Kris Cooke said has spoken at every school board meeting she has attended – falls into the latter category.

"I'm opposed to converting this money for the new high school into a piggybank-type situation and buying new roofs and other things," Stafford said. "If it's no longer needed, no longer required, it should be allowed to lapse."

Stafford said what some Guilford County commissioners are likely to say – that Guilford County actually sells school bonds.

Selling bonds is the same as borrowing money. Whether the county borrows the $74 million to build a gold-plated high school or to fix up already crumbling schools, the taxpayers will still have to repay that money with interest.

"You are not a good steward by spending it just because it is there," Stafford said. "It is better to let it lapse, which would mean our taxes wouldn't go up as much. A lot of this stuff on maintenance just came out of the woodwork. We didn't hear it four or five years ago."

Cooke replied, "Yes, you did, Joe."

The exchange brought up an interesting question: Is the bond referendum binding even though it was held before the biggest economic crash it 80 years and the county commissioners may decide that now is not the time to issue tens of millions worth of school bonds?

Duncan, a lawyer, said the referendum is binding and that the bonds have to be sold – but that the commissioners can affect when they are sold.

The question may be moot. The projects on the $75 million list of improvements are scattered throughout the districts of school board members, and throughout the districts of county commissioners, making it likely that the school board and the commissioners will come up with an agreement to spend the money, in the likely eventuality that the airport area high school isn't built.

School board member Nancy Routh, a former principal, said that North Carolina builds college buildings to last hundreds of years but that many K-12 schools have been shoddily built

Routh also said that, when the old Guilford County, Greensboro and High Point school systems were merged in 1992, not all of the schools were of equal quality – a statement that is visibly true to anyone who has spent much time in Guilford County middle and elementary schools.

Routh said, "I've always looked at elementary schools and said, 'I think it's interesting that the most temporary structures we build for education are elementary schools.'"

Routh also argued that the Board of Commissioners used its funding for Guilford County Schools maintenance as a piggybank last year – but the commissioners and the school board always squabble over maintenance funding, and the commissioners knew the school board would have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars left over from the $457 million building program.

Jody Butler, a northern Guilford County resident, argued that shifting the money from the airport area high school project to maintenance projects was ethically and morally wrong.

"I was a voter for this bond money," she said. It was sold for a new school for the airport area ... I don't want it to be shifted out of that area. When the economy changes, things are going to boom and I think it was going to be needed in that area."

"We have made no decisions," Duncan replied. "There are no decisions made. None."

Richard Beard, who is in commercial real estate, a graduate of Page High School and the father of a Page freshman, argued that the airport area high school won't be needed, because most residential expansion will be to the east of Greensboro. West of Greensboro, much of the land is planned to be used for industry.

Beard said, "I don't think it's a bad idea to take a look at some of these needs and look at shifting some of this money to use for maintenance projects."

Beard said that much of the maintenance that has been done at Page has been privately funded, which he called disappointing. He said of the Page auditorium, "The only thing I've seen that has changed since 1980 is that this carpet has been added."

There will be another hearing about the airport area high school on Wednesday, Nov. 28 at 7 p.m. at Southwest High School in High Point.