Wake schools will spend $5.6M to repair 3 schools they say were improperly built

The Wake County Public School System will pay $5.6 million to several contractors to repair and reassess structural deficiencies at three schools recently deemed "unsafe" for students.

Superintendent Robert Taylor provided an update to the Wake County Board of Education on Tuesday on the repairs and the contingency plans for each school in case work isn't done before the school year is set to begin.

Work started at the three schools --- Creech Road Elementary in Garner, Davis Drive Elementary in Cary and Durant Road Elementary in Raleigh --- this weekend.

On July 13, the Wake County Board of Education approved 9-0 Monday emergency construction contracts at the three schools with significant structural concerns.      

Repairs at the three schools will cost $5.6 million. That breaks down this way:

• $1.99 million at Creech Road Elementary

• $1.73 million at Durant Road Elementary

• $1.71 million at Davis Drive Elementary

• $147,000 for three assessments of the completed work by new contractors

The $5.6 million is coming from an existing budget item already meant for other work, meaning the school board will need to revise some of its plans that were set for this year at other schools. They'll do that as soon as next month.

Taylor said problems were found in 12 classrooms and five other rooms at Creech Road: The front office, cafeteria, kitchen, stage and loading dock.

At all schools, engineers found, via X-rays of walls, that grouting and connectors were missing among beams and other structures, leaving them not bonded together. Those areas also didn't have enough rebar.

"What the engineers found was not about aging; it was really about original construction," Taylor said. "What we realized was the building had not been constructed according to the architects' designs."

But who is responsible for that isn't clear. Taylor said district staff are still combing through old records and haven't been able to determine the contractors and the subcontractors involved.

It's possible whoever is responsible has done other work or may have inadequately constructed other things, Taylor acknowledged. But the district has inspectors checking buildings, he noted, which is what led to discovery of the three schools' issues.

The process for the district assessing whether a building was properly constructed as soon as it's built hasn't changed since the 1990s, Taylor said. Detecting something wrong inside walls --- not visible without X-rays --- isn't part of the process. That's something a contractor might hire a subcontractor to monitor during the construction process, before the work is covered up.

"What we try to do is to make sure that we look at every particular aspect of the construction if there is an issue," Taylor said. "There's a construction manager from the district that is on site to say, 'That is the wrong door. That is the wrong type of flooring.' So most of those kinds of things you're able to catch. When you talk about structural issues that may be internal to the wall, those are things that you may not catch."

School board and district leaders are still working out whether they can take legal action over what they say was improper construction. Under one statute, they could be barred from making a claim more than three years after the schools were built. Under another one, they would only have an avenue to sue so many years later if they could prove willful neglect on the part of the contractor --- essentially, that the contractor ignored obvious defects.

"That's what we're trying to work through at the moment," School Board Attorney Rod Malone said.

That frustrates Board Member Chris Heagarty, who is also an attorney, because the buildings were constructed using taxpayer dollars, and taxpayers didn't get what they paid for.

"A lot of us are concerned, any time a public building is constructed with taxpayer dollars," Heagarty said. "Should there be an opportunity for recovery,

A forum to be able to present your case and show that this is something that the contractor should have known or reasonably known?"

Durant Road Elementary School teachers will report this week to Abbotts Creek Elementary across the street.

The district will post updates on the repairs every five days on this webpage.

Durant Road Elementary is a year-round school set to start July 30, while Abbotts Creek Elementary is on a traditional calendar and set to start Aug. 24.

Work at Durant Road Elementary is expected to be done by Aug. 17, at which point Abbotts Creek staff will move back in and prepare for the school year, which is expected to start on time.

Creech Road and Davis Drive elementary schools are scheduled to start the year Aug. 24, with teachers reporting Aug. 17. But work at those schools isn't expected to finish until Aug. 21.

Taylor said he believes the repair work will be done on time, because contractors haven't found worse-than-expected conditions. In some cases, they found better conditions, he said.

The district has a backup plan for each school if they can't start on time.

Durant Road Elementary would use banked days and teacher workdays if they were unable to return to their school once their time at Abbotts Creek was up.

Creech Road Elementary would use a district flex site in Garner that will also host the district's Crossroads Flex school. Crossroads Flex is a small high school in which the students are largely taking classes virtually. Teachers will begin their workdays there Aug. 17.

Davis Drive students would have to move to a future Morrisville school site. Staff would shuttle to school from a parking lot away from the school.

The structural problems are a new headache in the district, which has been fighting infrastructure challenges for years and hearing a bevy of concerns about them from staff, students and families.

Namely, they're dealing with poorly functioning heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems that have caused early dismissals at dozens of schools on extreme temperature days. School board members have acknowledged the problems and set aside more funding for facilities but still have about $800 million remaining in deferred maintenance.  

The emergency at the three schools arose earlier this summer, when engineers found problems with the connections between walls and other parts of the building at Creech Road Elementary.

The school first had a visible crack in a school wall in the spring of 2024, according to district leaders. When district inspectors returned this spring, they found the crack has grown by an inch or two --- far faster than expected from a typical settling pattern, which can yield some cracks.

Durant Road Elementary and Davis Drive were built using the same design, prompting the district to examine those buildings as well. They found similar, but less severe, issues at those two schools. They didn't have cracks but had internal issues noted in wall X-rays. That led to an engineer telling the school system that all three schools were unsafe to occupy.

All three schools were built in the 1990s.

A fourth school was built using the same design but was not deemed unsafe.

Messages from the three schools' principals on July 10 indicated the schools weren't built according to their building plans. The buildings will need new and better connections within and between walls.

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