Sanford and Lee County’s significant growth has caught up with its public schools, and talks are taking shape (new elementary school?) on how to serve a rising student population
By Gordon Anderson and Richard sullins
gordon@rantnc.com | richard@rantnc.com
Growth presents challenges in every sector of a community. An influx of new residents means leaders,
particularly in the public sector, have to weigh how to adequately provide government
services at the scale necessary – water, transportation, public safety and more.
Nowhere is this more true than in the field of public education.
Public schools are often where the lives of everyday people intersect most directly with local government — kids need to be educated, after all, and even if one isn’t a particularly avid observer of local government’s doings, the education of your children is generally something you’re going to be interested in, and so it’s naturally where the rubber meets the road for lots of folks.
There are already plenty of kids to be educated, and families taking an interest in that education. Lee County’s rate of growth makes it clear there are probably going to be a whole lot more with each passing year. Current estimates put the county’s population at about 68,000 people, with a pace of for more than 75,000 by the start of the next decade.
Projections show 80,000 people living in Lee County by 2035.
Recent articles on new subdivisions and the county’s growth published by The Rant have been met with pleas for attention to the local public education system and “overcrowded” schools. As reported in recent months, Lee County’s schools are not technically overcrowded, but that doesn’t mean they won’t approach or even exceed capacity in the relatively near future.
Leaders in both the public school system and in county government have been laying the groundwork for a new elementary school for some time. It’s a slow process, though, and a complicated one with a lot of steps. There’s the matter of finding suitable land, lining up financing to pay for its purchase, hiring an architect to design the school, hiring a builder to stand it up, staffing the school, drawing new district lines, and more.
Most of those steps are still fairly far away. But steps are being taken.
The last new school built in Lee County was W.B. Wicker Elementary, opened in 2019 amid a period when Sanford’s economic development efforts really began to pay off. Through partnerships between the Lee County Board of Education, the Sanford Area Growth Alliance, county commissioners, municipal leaders in Sanford and Broadway, and even Central Carolina Community College, the region was already seeing a steady influx of new industries and new houses and, with them, new residents.
These gains, however, came with mounting pressure: many businesses looking to relocate to the area asked what our schools are like, and the answer for Lee County Schools in many cases had usually been something like “passing but unremarkable.” Many parts of the state with similar demographics grapple with the same reality, so that’s not a judgment on the ability of the educators in our community. It’s just that the need for modern, high-quality educational facilities has become more clear with each passing month both as a matter of community pride, and in order to sustain economic growth.
Well before W.B. Wicker opened, there were already rumblings about the need for additional schools — maybe not in any one specific area, but needed all the same.
North Carolina State University’s Institute for Transportation Research and Education (ITRE) presented a land use study to the school board in September, offering a data-driven view of the growth in Lee County and its impact on public schools. It reported that more than 79 residential developments are pending countywide and expected to bring more than 15,600 new housing units. It further reported that Sanford’s city limits continue to expand through annexation with robust industrial and commercial development, and that infrastructure capacity in areas like water, sewer, and transportation remains strong. But it concludes the schools will eventually reach capacity.
About 4,500 of the district’s roughly 9,000 students are at the elementary level. The ITRE estimates that number to grow to more than 6,000 within a decade. According to numbers presented to the school board in October, the district’s most crowded K-5 facility is Deep River Elementary, which was built in 1998 and already less than 50 students away from capacity. Broadway Elementary is projected to begin exceeding capacity by 2029-30, as is J. Glenn Edwards Elementary, built in 1987.
Other schools aren’t far behind. B.T. Bullock Elementary shares the same late-1990s building layout as Deep River and while not currently overcrowded, will likely reach its limit by 2030-31. Greenwood Elementary, Lee County’s southernmost elementary school, is holding steady for now, but even it is expected to operate near capacity by 2032-33. Only W.B. Wicker, which was built as an expansion of a historic campus with modern additions; Tramway Elementary, the county’s only year-round school which serves students across the county on a lottery admission basis; and J.R. Ingram Elementary in west Sanford have what could be characterized as breathing room. But even they could face pressure within 10 or 15 years if enrollment continues to rise as projected.
Coupled with the unpredictability of construction costs and the unpredictability of government funding sources the further you get from Lee County, the report essentially comes to the conclusion that if the best time to start planning for a new school was yesterday, then the next best time is now.
The Lee County Board of Education voted unanimously in September to begin the process of selecting a site for a new elementary school, which would be Lee County’s ninth (this doesn’t include campuses like Warren Williams, Floyd Knight, or Bragg Street Academy — those schools serve critical purposes, but also serve more niche populations).
The school board’s motion authorizes Superintendent Dr. Chris Dossenbach to begin searching for suitable land, including hiring a real estate agent.
The decision marked a turning point after years of growing concern that Lee County’s existing school infrastructure can’t keep pace with development. Representatives from the ITRE warned the board in September that waiting any longer could mean losing out on millions in potential funding from the N.C. Education Lottery and other state-level programs — funding sources whose application windows are quickly closing.
It is not yet known where exactly Lee County’s elementary school might go, but a separate report presented to the school board in October — the School Expansion Feasibility Update — made clear that a new school and not an expansion of one or more of the district’s existing schools would be the most cost effective.
The price tag for a new elementary school which would seat about 800 kids is anticipated to be about $56 million. Expanding existing campuses, by contrast, would run about $25 million per location, but only add 300 seats in each one. That means each seat would cost just shy of $66,000 in a new school, but more than $83,000 in an expansion.
Further, many of the existing campuses are more than capable of serving their current populations, but are bound by limitations in acreage as well aging infrastructure (maintenance costs at a new facility would be much lower than in an expanded campus, it’s noted), leading the study to conclude that expansion would be more of a “band aid” than a long-term solution for a county undergoing a rapid population boom.
For a local government project as massive as a new school, there’s more than one elephant in the room. The biggest one in this case is paying for it. A $56 million price tag isn’t cheap, but there are indications that it might not be as painful for local taxpayers as it could be. Lee County Schools has applied for a grant from the North Carolina Education Lottery that would, if approved, cover as much as $42 million of that cost. The Lee County Board of Commissioners — responsible by state statute for funding educational facilities — has agreed to cover the remaining $14 million if the state deems Lee County Schools’ application worthy of funding, giving some measure of hope that the price tag won’t overwhelm the county’s ability to meet all of its obligations without any kind of tax increase.
In North Carolina, the system for school construction funding is uniquely complicated. Counties are legally required to fund the construction and maintenance of public school buildings, but they’re largely or even completely removed from decisions about where or when those schools are built, how they’re staffed, and how they’re operated. Those decisions rest entirely with local boards of education, which identify the need, select sites, and request the necessary funding. This division of responsibility means the two boards have to coordinate since one of them makes the spending decisions while the other has to put up the money. And that coordination often comes with tension — the schools and the commissioners have spent much of the past two years in a back and forth over pay for classified staff that lags many other areas of the state, so funding a new school is an issue likely to come with some intense deliberating and negotiating in its own right, to say the least.
School construction in North Carolina requires one of two mechanisms — either a bond referendum or the issuance of limited obligation bonds. In a bond referendum, voters are asked to approve the spending and, if they do, give county governments authority to issue bonds to pay for it (and increase property taxes if needed). But North Carolina also requires bond referenda to be held in presidential election years, and as laid out earlier, waiting until 2028 just isn’t feasible with the county’s rate of current growth.
That leaves limited obligation bonds, which come with slightly higher interest rates than voter-approved spending. Luckily for Lee County and Lee County Schools, limited obligation bonds are actually preferred for the N.C. Lottery grant that’s being sought. But if that grant funding doesn’t come through, the question of how to fund a new elementary school hasn’t really been discussed by the two boards.
The question of schools and their capacity to educate the children in Lee County is a valid one, even if they aren’t overcrowded today. And it may be a number of months before we know where a new school might be located or what it will look like, and further years before ground is broken, construction gets under way, and doors finally open. But the matter is on the radar for leaders in the area, as is determining how to pay for it. Expect more discussion going forward.