Hoggard High students returned to school in person on Wednesday after a series of major cleanings to remediate mold. New Hanover County Schools Superintendent Dr. Chris Barnes said about five classrooms still need remediation, but the cafeteria, ROTC, orchestra, and band rooms are “back to business.”
As for the football field at Laney High School, which experienced significant flooding recently, the county has removed “several 100-pound bags of sand and debris” from the stormwater system; however, work still remains to entirely clear those pipes. Laney also has a final remediation left to complete for its orchestra room.
Related: Mold closes several wings of Hoggard High School, remediation costs approach $470,000
With the recent remediation issues, including those at Hoggard and Laney, the district has spent about $800,000 thus far, but Barnes said supporting the $320.5 million school bond on the November ballot will go a long way toward fixing some of the more systemic issues with HVAC systems.
As for proper drainage of the Laney football field, the district still has to address a larger root intrusion problem, but Barnes said they cannot necessarily address it now because they would have to dig up the piping. There are two systems that feed into the field — one the county/district is responsible for; the other, the City of Wilmington, which co-owns the neighboring Olsen Park with the county. According to Barnes, city staff will soon come out to clear their side of the stormwater system.
Barnes said the $800,000 in funding for these fixes is coming from savings from cuts he made to Central Office’s budget this past year; those savings totaled $1.4 million, money he wanted to put back into the district’s fund balance.
“When I talk about being at a subsistence level, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about; we don't have the ability to create funding for things before they break, and before they break so bad that they're not fixable,” he said.
In terms of planning for schools like Hoggard and Laney High Schools, “The two-week solution is to get everything clean and back to business. The two-month plan is to create systems, temporary systems that help address the humidity issues, and the two-year plan is to use the bond to address these aging systems permanently.”
Could having to remediate mold at Hoggard, Laney, and Noble Middle Schools recently mean that some of the pre-approved HVAC projects slated for the November school bond might move down the priority list? Barnes said there is a chance. While the major projects identified wouldn’t change, Hoggard’s aging HVAC systems might become a higher priority.
“So you've got [overall for the bond] $20 million for HVAC, $10 million for technology, $10 million for safety upgrades. If we have a list of HVAC projects, and suddenly number five breaks on the list before number 4, I'm going to reroute the numbers to sort of go where we need to go,” he said, adding, “[although] I would not allow a significant project change without the board and the [county] commissioners being involved in the decision.”
Statutorily, the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners is responsible for providing the school district’s capital funds.
Barnes also wanted to address head-on concerns that he’d ‘turned off’ air conditioning around the district.
“[I] didn't turn the air off everywhere in the district,” he said.
He said the district has a longstanding practice of lowering energy use in the summer, known as "temperature setbacks." They didn’t turn HVAC systems entirely off, but didn’t cool buildings as much when students weren’t on campus. Barnes previously told WHQR that some older systems can’t control humidity and temperature independently. While he acknowledged that some of these issues stem from deferred maintenance due to a long-term lack of capital funds, he also pointed to the unusually high heat and humidity this past summer.
Booster Club issues being resolved at Laney High
While the district is doing its best to respond to emerging capital needs, parents and staff have helped by addressing concerns publicly.
With Hoggard, over 20 teachers wrote a letter asking for immediate remediation and easily accessible reports, which the district has since provided.
As for Laney, Booster Club member parent Gina Solari has been asking the district to fix the issues with the football field and the field house. She claimed that upper administration wasn’t listening to the needs of parents and the community.
Because of the amount of rain this fall — and the issues identified with the stormwater systems at the field — the athletic fields and field house at Laney have experienced major flooding, forcing the football team to cancel at least two games this season.
Solari and other parents were concerned that sewage remained after the flooding.
Barnes wanted to alleviate their concerns, so “we had a second inspection done, and cleaned a second time, and then decided to go back through and remove all the lockers so that we could make sure we did a deep cleaning of all of it.”
Solari was also concerned about injuries on the field, noting that a player last season stepped in a hole and broke his ankle; however, Barnes said that when looking at field injuries across the district’s high schools, Laney did not have an elevated number.
She added that her advocacy “is for the safety, health, and well-being of our students. And that should be your number one priority. This is not about — I've tried to be very clear that this is not about playing time and this is not about positions on the field.”
Solari also claimed Laney's upper administration treated the Laney Booster Club poorly last spring. Things came to a head, and according to her, the club couldn’t run concessions at some track and field events. Barnes didn’t address that directly, but acknowledged issues that Central Office had to mediate between boosters on one side and Principal Danny Little and Athletic Director Fred Lynch on the other.
While Barnes said the last booster club meeting he attended went well, a recent September parent-community meeting of about 50 people about the Laney fields with Central Office staff and school officials did not go off without incident. Athletic Director Fred Lynch was asked to leave because of how he was interacting with the Laney community.
Before that meeting, Solari also came to the school board’s September public comment period to voice her concerns and told WHQR that she will continue to support Laney students.
“At the end of the day, I'm going to advocate for what's right not only for my kid, but for all of the other kids that play on that field and attend Laney. Somebody has to,” she said.
