Moore County’s three newly elected school board members ran on wide-ranging platforms challenging Moore County Schools’ academic ratings and most of the decisions the current board has made since it began working on a countywide redesign of school attendance districts last year.
When David Hensley, Philip Holmes and Robert Levy are sworn in, they’ll be weighing in on the potential sale of three school campuses that have closed or soon will be. They also plan to call for the board to reexamine another issue of immediate interest to the parents of elementary school children: the district’s plans to shift K-5 students to four days per week in class on Jan. 5.
Swearings-in for the three new school board members are scheduled for an organizational meeting at Union Pines on Dec. 7. The Moore County Board of Education will meet for the final time in its current iteration on Monday.
Putting the Brakes on School Sales
At Monday’s meeting, the board will consider a contract for the sale of the old Aberdeen Elementary School on U.S. 1 for $1.5 million.
The school board is also expected to authorize the district’s administrators to open bids for the old Aberdeen Primary campus on Keyser Street. The proposed starting bid of $120,000 is based on an offer from a local independent youth wrestling club, but the district will accept higher bids until one goes unchallenged for 10 days.
But the school board’s incoming members, who will ultimately be part of the vote on whether or not to sell that six-acre property to the highest bidder, have questioned whether it’s prudent for the district to sell old campuses in the first place.
“I think the board right now wants to make a quick sale and I’m totally against that,” said Philip Holmes, who won the District 5 seat representing Aberdeen and Pinebluff.
“I really think we need to slow down.”
Citing an already-stretched capital repair budget, Moore County Schools commissioned appraisals of the two Aberdeen schools a year ago — as well as the two Southern Pines campuses that will be replaced in January — with a view to divesting the district of those aging properties soon after students leave them.
But incoming board members see those schools as a future asset in light of the district’s forecasted enrollment growth and the already-defined need for more middle and high school classrooms in southern Moore County.
Robert Levy, who won the race against Helena Wallin-Miller for the school board’s District 2 seat, said that even if the schools had no future need for those properties, a market deflated due to the coronavirus pandemic does not constitute the ideal circumstances for selling them.
“Property sold in the middle of a pandemic is not going to bring as high a price as it might otherwise have, and if we buy property several years from now for these new schools that we’re certainly going to need based on growth, it’s going to cost our taxpayers an inordinate amount of additional funds,” Levy said.
“The Aberdeen Primary school is a very good example of what you don’t want to do. The current bid for that school … represents very little money when it’s put up against the yearly budget of the schools. It makes much more sense to lease out that property and to keep it as a future learning center rather than sell it at a depressed price.”
The Aberdeen primary school was appraised at around $635,000 a year ago. But the school board learned that week that it’s unlikely to sell as a potential residential development, as it’s too far away from shopping and other amenities for a developer to qualify for subsidies to build low-income housing there.
The new school board, to which incumbent Stacey Caldwell was re-elected this week, is also expected to resume discussing the possible sale of the Southern Pines Primary and Southern Pines Elementary campuses. The current board has delayed taking bids on those properties while school staff explore private sales to two interested parties.
Moore Montessori Community School, a public charter, is working toward purchasing the Southern Pines Elementary campus on May Street for the appraised value of just under $1.1 million. The Southern Pines Land and Housing Trust, a local nonprofit hoping to build a cultural and community center, has offered to buy the Southern Pines Primary campus on Carlisle Street but for less than its appraised value.
David Hensley, winner of the school board’s District 4 seat, has said that he hopes to steer the board toward retaining ownership of the schools where possible. State statutes specifically compel local school boards to grant leases of surplus property to charter schools where requested, unless they can demonstrate that such a lease is not economically or practically feasible.
“It is disingenuous for the Board of Education to complain $131 million per year not being enough money to operate our schools, then try and sell schools below their market value,” Hensley said in an email to The Pilot. “I believe the Board of Education should follow North Carolina law and lease any facilities to interested charter schools and, absent any interest, maximize revenue to be used for educational purposes by offering the surplus properties for public sale to the highest bidder.”
Holmes concurred, and said that he’ll be a firm voice against selling any other school property once installed on the board.
“The Southern Pines school, that’s a historic piece of property. That is a property that could be better off being leased,” he said. “Hypothetically if we were to lease Southern Pines, say to the Montessori school, that would be a revolving income for the schools. I’m not sure what we would lease it for, but that would be money that we currently don’t have.”
Pushing for More In-Person Instruction
Moore County Schools started the academic year on the most aggressive reopening plan permitted by the state, with classrooms at about half capacity for moderate social distancing. To achieve that, all students in grades K-12 have attended school either Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday with online work supplementing those two days in class.
About 3,600 students voluntarily enrolled in the district’s new all-virtual Connect Academy for the fall semester.
Soon after Gov. Roy Cooper announced that local school districts could return to minimal levels of social distancing in kindergarten through fifth grade on Oct. 5, Moore County Schools surveyed elementary parents and teachers to gauge their level of comfort with full classrooms.
While more than 70 percent of those parents were ready to send their children back to school full-time, only about a quarter of elementary-level teachers said they would be comfortable teaching in full — and in some cases crowded, with less than three feet between desks — classrooms again.
So the school board approved a plan to wait on a fuller elementary school reopening until January, so that families who prefer it can enroll in all-virtual learning for the spring semester and vice versa.
But the school board’s new members plan to call for a reassessment of that plan, and have criticized the current board for delaying the move to Plan A. .
“There’s a lot of parents that want their children to be back in school, and they should be,” said Holmes. “The superintendent said that it would be a logistical nightmare. Well, he needs to make it happen.
“We need to support the teachers, but at the same time, this is their job and we need to find a solution to satisfy the parents as well.”
Moore County Schools is also preparing to have plans in place in January to move middle and high school students to a modified “Plan A” with four days per week of instruction as soon as the state authorizes it.
Holmes and Levy both said that, by the time they’re sworn in in early December it will likely be too late for a realistic acceleration of the Plan A timeline for elementary students. Holmes said that he’d like to hear input from a broad swath of parents and school staff on what Plan A looks like now.
“We do need to get the students back in school but you cannot make it happen in a couple of weeks. You just can’t. It’s going to take some time,” said Holmes.
“We need to have a town hall meeting once we set the agenda where we can discuss this so we can get input from the parents. Even if it’s over Zoom, we need to get feedback.”
But all three of the newly-elected board members said they’ll push for the schools to reassess the potential for students to return five days a week rather than four.
“A four day per week option does little for the single working parent or dual income households who do not have a childcare solution for the fifth day,” Hensley said. “The Board of Education should honor the parents’ wishes by tasking the central office to produce two options: a full five day per week option for the 74 percent of parents who want that and a 100 percent virtual option for the rest.”
Holmes said he hopes to see the schools assign individual teachers to either virtual or physical classrooms, and avoid asking some teachers to do both as they have this past semester. All three new board members said they’ll support virtual learning going forward for the families who elect for their children to learn from home.
“I believe that our virtual teaching is here to stay, and for many reasons even well after the pandemic that should be kept in place, Levy said “But for most of our students who want to have five days a week learning, we need to go into that five days a week learning just as quickly as possible.”
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School Board Shakeup: New Members Aim at Campus Sales, COVID Plans - Southern Pines Pilot
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