 A gymnasium addition would link the existing school to the old gym, which would become a cafeteria. For a larger version, CLICK HERE> |
Davidson and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials on Tuesday unveiled a $7.6 million proposal to jointly renovate and expand Davidson IB Middle School, at 251 South St. In a presentation at the monthly Town Board meeting, officials said the plan would update the aging building and end the town’s 15-year search for a permanent community recreation center.
The school would continue to house the popular international baccalaureate program for grades 6-8. It would get badly needed improvements, such as heating and cooling systems, as well as expanded facilities. The town would own or share about 60 percent of the building, including permanent space for Parks & Recreation offices, a renovated 300-seat auditorium and a new gymnasium with locker rooms.
 Planning director Kris Krider outlines community center plans. (Bill Giduz photo) |
“What we’re trying to do is preserve and enhance some of the facilities,” Davidson Planning Director Kris Krider told citizens and the town board.
Added Anthony Ansaldo, chief architect with CMS: “We think this is a pretty good project for both partners.”
The audience Tuesday night included school officials, school neighbors, and citizens involved in town recreational activities.
Davidson IB school principal Jo Karney liked the idea of sharing the renovated school with the community. “I think this is a fabulous idea, and I live in Davidson, so I have the resident hat on as well. … We want to be the hub of the community, and I think it’s just a great project,” she said.
Sterling Martin, chair of the town’s Parks & Recreation Advisory Committee, called it an “opportunity we cannot afford to pass up, if we have to beg, borrow and steal in order to make it happen.”
Mr. Martin noted that the town has been looking for sites and making plans for a recreation center for years. “We have agonized over the fact that we don’t have enough indoor playing space. We didn’t have enough indoor playing space when we only had 3,000 people in town. We have 9,000 people now and we’re looking at having 18,000 probably in the next 10 years,” he said.
PAYING FOR IT
Whether Davidson participates or not, CMS is planning to renovate the school after the 2008-2009 school year. The school system already has $3.6 million for the renovations, money voters approved as part of last November’s school bond referendum. Davidson’s share would be about $4 million.
The challenge for the town, if the board decides to endorse the project, will be figuring out how to pay for it. Mr. Krider suggested the town could use funds contributed by developers under the town’s Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance, or APFO, for at least part of the money. It likely would borrow money as well.
Town Manager Leamon Brice told Mr. Ansaldo the pricetag for the project “was bigger than we expected,” and said the town would like to look at alternatives, such as building the project in phases, starting with the new gym.
“It’s an option, but it’s not what I would recommend that you do and it’s not what I would do if I were you,” Mr. Ansaldo said. “But, if that’s what we need to do, then we’ll do that.”
Mr. Brice replied, “We’re having a hard time chewing on this nut, I can tell you. It’s bigger than we expected and we just like to look at some alternatives to try to get it down.”
The schools system’s outside architect, Vincent Ciccarelli of Insight Architects in Charlotte, told the town board this project would provide a community center at far less than the cost of a stand-alone facility. He estimated that buying land and constructing a separate center would cost about $7 million – or $3 million more than the town’s share of this project.
Mr. Martin said the town should jump at the chance get a long-wanted facility on the cheap. “We’re going to get twice the space than we could afford to get on our own. We’re going to get cooperation from the school system and start a partnership that might expand as we build another school somewhere else that will allow us to do something similar. So I just feel it’s an opportunity that we cannot afford to pass up at this time.”
Parks & Recreation Director Steve Fraher said the town also would consider a similar partnership with CMS in the future when the system builds a new elementary school on N.C. 73, near Bradford Park.
PROPOSAL TIME LINE
The project next will be presented to the community at a public forum on May 27 at 6 p.m. at Town Hall.
After that, the Town Board will be asked to consider an interlocal agreement, or contract, with the school system that would govern how they would share the cost and tasks of constructing and operating the school and community center. That will come up for a vote on June 10.
School officials are eager to keep the project moving. “CMS is on a very fine timeline to get the renovations done,” Mr. Krider said.
The system hopes to have plans approved by a year from now, to choose a contractor, and begin work. The school would be closed during the 2009-10 school year, and the IB program would operate temporarily out of another site – possibly Long Creek Elementary School on Beatties Ford Road in Huntersville.
BUILDINGS AND GROUNDS
If the plans go forward, it could give both the school and the town a facility that neither can afford alone, officials said.
Plans call for overhauling the current classroom building. The existing auditorium would be renovated as well, and an addition would link the main school building to the current separate gymnasium behind the school. The old gymnasium would be converted to a modern cafeteria, and the addition would house a new gymnasium with modern locker rooms – something the current gym lacks.
Altogether, the school would grow in size from about 37,350 square feet to 68,820 square feet. (To download the preliminary site plan as a PDF, CLICK HERE>)
Besides repairing and enlarging the building, the plan calls for expanding the school’s front parking lot, on South Street, and creating a rear parking area next to a soccer field at the back of the 5.3-acre site.
GATE ON HILLSIDE
Also, the bus drop-off and pickup pattern would change. Buses currently drive through the school grounds via Cathey Street and exit onto South Street. The proposed project calls for building an access road connecting the school grounds to Hillside Drive, which is currently a dead-end. Buses would enter the school through a gate at Hillside, and queue along Cathey Street. From their, they would head out onto South.
Mr. Ciccarelli said planners had studied various routes. “Buses would no longer move through the site. They would come down Hillside Drive,” he said, pointing to a map of the site. At the rear of the site, near the current sports field, a new private parking lot would be built, with a gate opening to Hillside.
The gate “would be open just for bus pickup,” he said. “They would be able to pull through and basically stack on Cathey Street.”
The amount of bus traffic would be limited compared to most Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Mr. Ciccarelli said. “Given the size of the school, it’s about 8-10 buses. Morning drop-off, they usually come a few at a time, so there’s only dismissal time where you’d have a stack of buses.”
Bill Giduz, a Hillside Drive resident, asked if his street would become a permanent cut-through.
“It’s not a cut-through,” Mr. Krider said. “This is not a public right-of-way, this is not a new street. … We are not recommending that it become a town street. There will be a gate there.”
SITE CHOICE
Mr. Krider and Mr. Fraher both said the town settled on the choice of the South Street site after a lengthy process that looked at other potential locations. The IB school has ranked atop the town’s priority list in recent years, along with another site that did not work out – Calvary Presbyterian Church on South Street near the elementary school.
“We felt that it was important to look at South Street, quite frankly, because … other than downtown, it’s probably one of the most public streets in town, because of the schools that are on it,” Mr. Krider said. “So we felt it’s important, because one of the major user groups will be families, to locate it in something that’s both affordable, but also to locate in a place that reaches out to everyone, and not just to any one particular neighborhood.”
Mr. Martin said the South Street site made the most sense. “We have looked at sites we have agonized over where the site would be that would speak to everybody equally in the community. As has been pointed out, the South Street spot is probably the most neutral spot in town at this point, because the kids have been coming to McEver Field, they’ve been playing from the west side and the east side for years. The schools are located there. So it’s perfect spot at least for the nucleus of park and rec, it seems to me.”
DOCUMENTS
Site plan of the proposed joint IB School/Community Center (PDF, requires Adobe Reader software)
Draft interlocal agreement that would spell out how Davidson and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools would collaborate and pay for the project. The Town Board is expected to vote on the agreement in June. (PDF, requires Adobe Reader software)
WHAT’S NEXT
The town will host a public forum about the IB School/Community Center project on May 27, 6 p.m., at town hall.
For the most part, creating a centrally located community center is a great idea. And an intensive cooperative recreation venture between town and CMS is long overdue. However, looking at the site plan, it appears that the seventy-five year old nature trail and preserve behind the school will be essentially eliminated. It will be paved over by a parking lot.
The school and neighborhood has been working for ten years to reclaim that area, building walking trails, a bridge, benches, erosion controls, an outdoor classroom, nature study projects, clearing underbrush that threatened 100 ft. hardwood trees, and preserving a small patch for wildlife. It is an oasis in a town where natural space is becoming quickly extinct.
It would be nice if the planners could come up with an alternative parking and access plan, and keep the woods. This ten acre refuge– where neighborhood kids can make up their own adventures outside of structured adult-directed programs– is an important recreational element.
Finally, the land there is a steep slope. Hundreds of loads of fill dirt will have to be trucked in, tamped down, and bulldozed flat. Giant retaining walls will have to be built. Once again, the South/Walnut area will be inundated by muddy, noisy, diesel-fumed construction traffic for a year or more.
All of this discomfort and the destruction of a natural in-town play area for just 26 parking spaces? Surely we can do better.
Build the rec center, but cut the parking lot and Save the Park!
The IB School-Community Center Project seems to me a visionary idea, offering just the kind of multiple uses of limited space which our urbanizing town needs. It should happen! The proposed parking lot, however, would damage an important town-school-environment resource–the woods below the soccer field–for purposes which could be met better in other ways.
It’s important to look at uses for the school woods with open eyes. (I could be biased, since my house is next door.)
The parking lot proposed would occupy only about half the school woods. But the remaining steeply sloping area, partly taken up by a run-off catch-basin, would provide only a remnant of the benefits listed.
The lot would be a suburban, Wal-Mart style attempt to solve an urban problem — the essential parking needs — which can be met less destructively and expensively by measures such as leasing week-day use of parking space nearby. We should save the school woods for future generations.
Bob Maier makes an important point. The combined IB school and community center is a great idea, but we should do everything we can to avoid cutting trees and destroying natural areas.
The building construction alone will cover a lot of currently-open space, and probably take down a few trees. That probably can’t be helped, but there must be a way to minimize the destruction for the parking lot.
Instead of filling and paving the forest behind the IB school, why not work out an agreement with the Davidson United Methodist Church to share parking? The DUMC parking lot is enormous. It’s full on Sunday mornings, and occasionally for other events, but it is rarely full on weekdays or Saturdays.
DUMC folks use the IB school parking lot on Sundays; why not let the IB school/community center use the DUMC parking lot on weekdays? There’s also on-street parking on South Street and elsewhere in the neighborhood.
Sharing parking lots won’t be easy, of course. There will be issues to work out. But I can’t help but think that working through those issues is a better solution than clear-cutting trees and adding more asphalt to a neighborhood that’s already got more than its share.