School Board committee discusses school facilities with Chocowinity town officials | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    The School Board's Building and Grounds Committee, meeting in its regular monthly meeting Monday (3-12-12), met with representatives of the Town of Chocowinity (Mayor Jimmy Mobley, Commissioner Billy Albritton and Public Works Director Kevin Brinkhouse) to discuss school facilities in the Chocowinity area. The immediate issue was a modular unit currently located at Chocowinity Middle School which has been permitted to be used within the Town's jurisdiction via a zoning Special Use Permit. The permit was said to have been originally issued for three years but that has long expired. So the question was whether the Town would extend the Special Use Permit to allow the unit to continue to be used or whether the school system would have to remove the unit.

    The issue has come before the Town Board several times in recent months but the School Board does not currently have funds to replace the unit with permanent construction. Much of the discussion Monday centered on how that dilemma can best be addressed going forward.

    Superintendent Don Phipps reviewed the school system's facilities planning process noting that the County Commissioners had just had a facilities inventory completed for all facilities in the county. He also indicated that the next step is to get a student population study done that will project future enrollments. That is pending approval by the County Commission. Dr. Phipps explained that with the population study the School Board would then have the two pieces of information it needs to develop a plan for addressing not only the facility needs in the Chocowinity area, but to be able to compare those needs to the other needs in all the schools...something the school system has not had in recent memory.

    Mayor Mobley indicated that the Town Board feels an urgent need to address school facility needs at both Chocowinity Primary and Chocowinity Middle because the town and immediate vicinity is growing and when the economy improves they expect, based on their water and sewer planning, that there will be significant growth in the area. He stated: "having satisfactory school facilities is essential to Chocowinity's continued growth and development. While we expect new commercial development, we have recently had requests for providing sewer to new residential construction. Residential construction will require adequate school facilities."

    In recent years Chocowinity has been one of the fastest growing areas in the county, but Chocowinity got a relatively small portion of the $39.6 million spent on school construction since the 2004 bond issue was passed.

    Mobley said: "Chocowinity supported the bond issue. We did so because we were promised that Chocowinity's needs would be addressed after Phase I of the bond program was completed. We are now at that point. We need to address the immediate school needs and we also need to look forward to address what we know is coming." He went on to explain that the Town is currently implementing an upgrade to its sewer system and that they expect to be ready with utilities, but that inadequate schools could be a real negative impact on the area's future unless a solution is found. "We realize that money is tight now but the needs are there and they will only get worse unless we move to address them. We've waited for over seven years for something to be done to provide adequate school facilities and we feel the time has come to figure out how we're going to approach this problem," he said.

    Terry Williams, the school board member from the Chocowinity area agreed with Mobley on the need to find a solution for Chocowinity's facility's needs. "We've got to figure out a way to address this problem. The mobile unit at Chocowinity Middle is just a symptom of the problem. There are mobile units at Chocowinity Primary also. We need those teaching stations because the students are already there. Both schools have been growing faster than any in the county and anybody who knows anything about the area knows that the growth is likely to become even greater as the economy improves and more people who work in Greenville seek places to live in Beaufort County. I feel like we've addressed the needs in other areas of the county and Chocowinity has been very patient. But the time has come to address these needs," Williams told the Observer.

    At the time the bond program was being developed, Chocowinity had needs that were not included in the first phase, except an eight classroom addition to Chocowinity Primary. After parents from both Chocowinity Primary and Middle pointed this out (to Dr. Tony Parker, then superintendent) the classroom addition at the Primary School was increased and Dr. Parker attended a PTO meeting at Chocowinity Middle School and asked the people to support the bond issue, stating that Chocowinity Middle would be addressed in "Phase II." He was asked to put that in writing and he did. In May of 2004 he published a newsletter outlining Phase II of the building program. Click here to review that document.

    But as the May, 2004 Beacon shows, Dr. Parker left to become superintendent in Johnston County and Jeff Moss because superintendent of Beaufort County. Moss then directed the $33 million building program that ended up going $6.4 million over budget. Thus, there were no funds for a "Phase II."

    However, parts of the Phase II plan were implemented, from annual budget appropriations, for John Cotton Tayloe and Northside High School, but not for either Chocowinity Primary or Chocowinity Middle. Some observers believe what actually happened was that School Board Chairman Robert Belcher worked a deal to get Tayloe's needs addressed by supporting a major edition that went more than $300,000 over the original budget for a "weightroom" at Northside. Belcher had been principal at Tayloe before going on the school board. One parent PTO leader involved in the bond campaign told us: "Chocowinity got the shaft in the bond package. It passed because Chocowinity voted for it rather than against it. Then when the School Board was going way over budget on the Phase I projects neither William Warren (Chocowinity's school board representative) or Jay McRoy (County Commissioner from Chocowinity) ever raised a peep about all the money being exhausted without addressing CMS's needs. The fastest growing area of the county got the smallest piece of the pie." Regardless of how it happened, no new construction was built at Chocowinity Middle so the needs still exist. In the meantime, Chocowinity Primary is overcrowded and getting more so.

    You can watch the video of the portion of the meeting that dealt with Chocowinity in the clips below: