GREENSBORO — A new school that will serve students in the western part of Guilford County is one major step closer to being built.
High Point's City Council voted Tuesday to annex the land for the school and then to rezone it for institutional use.
The votes were 7-2 and 6-3, respectively. The new school — to be named for famed NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson — is expected to have a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math theme, and include STEM laboratories for use by the students there. It will serve kindergarten through eighth grade, a configuration that's more common in other states and among charter schools and private schools.
As Guilford County Schools Superintendent Whitney Oakley explained, students will come from a-yet-to-be-set geographic area around the school, rather than through a school choice or magnet process.
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Neighbors of the properties at 721 S. Bunker Hill Road and 8869 and 8871 Boylston Road fought hard to keep the school annexation and rezoning from happening, bringing forward a wide variety of concerns including traffic and quality-of-life issues, but came up short on Tuesday, with only High Point Mayor Jay Wagner and Councilmen Britt Moore and Victor Jones casting opposing votes.
That vote came after an hours-long hearing that dominated Tuesday's city council meeting.
Council members had plenty of questions for High Point City planners recommending the project, other city staff, the school district representatives, and some of the Colfax neighbors who spoke out against the proposal. Topics were all over the map — Wagner asked about lighting for the school sports fields, for example — but one major chunk centered around school-attendance numbers and patterns, and whether a new school at this location would actually benefit High Point.
"When you ask a council to make these type of very important and emotional decisions and we take an oath to uphold the best interests of High Point, it would be interesting to know at least what your anticipation of the attendance is, because I don't think Colfax pays taxes in High Point," Moore said.
Oakley said school officials have seen explosive growth in the east, northwest and south of the county, and broader, shallower declines in enrollment across the rest of the district. The growth of charter schools in the area and more people homeschooling their children since the pandemic are contributing factors to the declines. She added that it's not clear yet how lasting the shift to homeschooling might be, and that it can also be complicated to make predictions about students in charter schools, because many families who go with charter schools for elementary school come back to the district for middle or high school.
She said one major long-term goal for the district is to shift students out of mobile units like the ones currently being used at nearby elementary schools. Part of her passion for that goal, she said, is thinking about a mobile unit at the former Hampton Elementary School in Greensboro that blew apart on a Sunday in 2018 when no students were present.
"It’s not a picture that I can get out of my head," she said.
In explaining his desire to vote in favor of the measure, Councilman Cyril Jefferson said that when schools are seeing declining enrollment, as some are in High Point, it's not just a function of what the school district does or how it draws its attendance lines, or where it puts new schools. The City of High Point, he said, has a role to play in slowing or reversing school-enrollment declines by investing in communities in ways that make people want to live there.
The vote by the High Point Council allows Oakley to go forward with asking the school board to approve the finalization of purchasing the land. Guilford County commissioners will have to approve the price for the sale.