Schoolhouse Shuffle - Each planned move opens up possibilities and prompts other moves within the system

With the new Career Center being built on the same property as the Kennedy Learning Center on North Highland Avenue, school officials have decided to open a new career-technical high school in the Kennedy building.

That will allow technical students to use the new Career Center's shops and other technical facilities.

And the moves also will create a shuffle effect so that, one day, Deaton-Thompson Stadium on West Clemmonsville Road should have better access and parking.

Separately, as traditional sources of money for furniture and equipment for new classrooms dry up, officials with Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools also are looking at creative ways to pay for $16.5 million for furniture, equipment and technology for the Career Center and other capital projects under way.

School officials also are facing higher-than-expected costs for a storm-water system at the Kennedy site, which will become home to Carter Vocational High School, which serves students with mental, physical or learning disabilities. When the new Carter opens in time for the 2010-11 school year, the word "vocational" will be dropped, and it will be renamed C. Douglas Carter High School.

In 2006, Forsyth County voters passed $250 million in bonds for projects that included a new home for Carter, which is budgeted for $6 million. Originally, school officials were planning to spend about $3 million in bond money to renovate Carter's current home on South Main Street for a career-technical high school, which would offer training programs for students who probably would not be going on to college.

The Career Center's offerings include such technical programs as building construction and automotive mechanics, and, after the decision was made to also put the new Career Center on the Kennedy property, school officials decided to put the career-technical high school in the Kennedy building as well.

The new career technical high school also will offer such training programs as pharmacy assistant and law enforcement.

"I really like the idea of that high school," board member Jill Tackaberry said this week.

Now that the old Carter building is available, school officials want to move the Griffith Academy program for middle- and high-school students who have had serious discipline problems to that site. Such a move would enable them to tear down the older part of the Griffith building on West Clemmonsville Road to improve access and parking for the stadium, which is behind the school.

"That's a big deal," Superintendent Don Martin told school-board members earlier this week. "You end up with a new entrance to the football stadium."

The older part of Griffith, which was built in the mid-1920s, is no longer used by students. It is the last remaining wood-framed school in the system. Later additions, including an auditorium and gym, would be left standing.

The Griffith program would be moved after Carter opens. The demolition and improvements to the stadium would have to wait, though, because money for that is not readily available. That probably would be included in a proposed 2012 bond referendum.

To open up space for the career-technical high school, school officials also plan to move Kennedy's Millennium Academy, which is for middle-school students with less serious behavior problems than those at Griffith, to the old Carter building, and Kennedy's English as a Second Language program to a school not yet chosen.

Some programs that are at Kennedy now, such as LEAP Academy, which was established in 1996 to help students who have been held back to move up to the next grade, will stay at Kennedy.

Both the Career Center and the school system's administrative offices on Miller Street are moving so that nearby Forsyth Technical Community College can expand. In 2008, voters authorized $62 million in bonds for those projects, providing $38.5 million for the school system to make the move and $23.5 million for Forsyth Tech to make renovations.

The school-system's administrative offices are moving to two properties on the north side of town formerly owned by Hanesbrands Inc. Some administrators now working at Griffith also will move there. The buildings will be renovated and are scheduled to open July 1.

For the Career Center, the school system is building two buildings -- one for classrooms and one to house the shops and other technical programs.

Although the current Career Center is housed in one building, more-recent building codes made school officials decide that it would be better to build a main building and a separate technical building.

Darrell Walker, the school system's assistant superintendent for operations, said he expects to put that project out for bid this spring.

The new Career Center is scheduled to open by July 1, 2011.

Forsyth Tech, meanwhile, will renovate in two phases -- moving into the old administrative offices by the time the 2011-12 school year starts and moving into the old Career Center space by January 2013. Gary Green, Forsyth Tech's president, said that he is looking forward to having those buildings available to the college.

"We are really in desperate need of that space," he said.

When planning for the 2008 bonds, college officials were projecting an enrollment of 8,500 by 2015. The enrollment this school year is already 9,200.

kunderwood@wsjournal.com
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