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Wake County Superintendent Robert Taylor laid out the price tag Tuesday for emergency repairs to make three elementary schools safe for students again and the contingency plans if the work takes longer than expected.
Last week, the school board authorized Taylor to enter into emergency contracts for repair work at Creech Road Elementary in Garner, Davis Drive Elementary in Cary and Durant Road Elementary in Raleigh. On Tuesday, Taylor said that the repair work will cost $5.6 million and that they have contingency plans to relocate students at all three schools if needed.
“When it comes to having a building full of children and their safety, I will always err on the side of safety, and so we accept whatever the costs will be for that and the disruption that it may make,” Taylor said at the school board meeting. “But safety of students has always been paramount for me and students cannot learn if they’re not safe.”
Taylor said the money for the repairs will come from a line item in the district’s capital improvement budget that covers partial repairs and improvements at schools. Taylor said administrators will tell the board in August which existing projects might have to be adjusted or omitted due to the emergency repairs.
Durant Road contingency plan
Taylor said they’re confident that the work at all three schools will be completed by the scheduled dates of Aug. 17 for Durant Road and Aug. 21 for Creech Road and Davis Drive. But he said there are contingency plans for all three schools.
The district will give updates on its website every five days on the status of the work, Taylor said.
The repairs won’t be done at Durant before the year-round school has its first day of classes on July 30.
Durant students will start the new school year at nearby Abbotts Creek Elementary, where students are still on summer break until Aug. 24. Durant Road staff will occupy Abbotts Creek through Aug. 14.
If the work isn’t done by Aug. 14, Taylor said they will use options such as remote instruction days, teacher workdays and banked days for Durant. “Banked days” refers to the extra time built into the school year so that classes don’t have to be made up due to emergencies such as inclement weather.
There will be zero impact on Abbotts Creek from the Durant Road relocation, Taylor said.
Creech Road contingency plan
The work at Creech Road and Davis Drive is scheduled to be done three days before the first day of classes at the traditional-calendar schools on Aug. 24.
Creech Road teachers will use the Garner ninth-grade center, a converted movie theater at 2101 Spring Drive for teacher workdays to prepare for the start of the school year.
If the work isn’t done by Aug. 21, Taylor said they’ll initially use the options of remote days, teacher workdays and banked days. If the work extends much longer, Taylor said Creech Road students will use the Garner ninth-grade center.
Crossroad FLEX High School is also scheduled to use the Garner ninth-grade center next school year. Taylor said there will be enough room there for both the elementary and high school students.
Davis Drive contingency plan
The Davis Drive contingency plan will be the hardest if it’s used, Taylor said.
Like with the other two schools, Taylor said the short-term option would be to use remote days, workdays and banked time if there’s a brief delay in getting Davis Drive ready.
If the delay is more long-term, Taylor said they’d relocate Davis Drive students to the new Morrisville High School campus being built on 6333 Little Drive.
But Taylor said they’d have to deal with issues such as lack of parking and smaller classrooms than normal for elementary students. The parking deck isn’t ready, so Taylor said they’d need teachers to drive to another location on Paramount Parkway and be shuttled to the high school.
Why weren’t the problems found sooner?
Taylor said the system worked for finding the problems.
The cracks at Creech Road were first noticed in a classroom in 2024. But Taylor said the cracks were consistent with the kind of changes that buildings go through as they age.
Taylor said the district monitored the cracks and saw this spring they had expanded. It led to a structural engineer determining that the problems weren’t age-related.
“The building hadn’t been constructed to the architect’s drawings,” Taylor said.
Issues were found in 12 classrooms and in five non-classroom areas, including the cafeteria. It led to the enginner sayiing the building was not safe for students.
“We believe that students were never in any danger of a building collapsing on them,” Taylor told reporters after the board meeting. “But if we had not taken action and not made the necessary repairs, then you certainly could have put students in that position. That is why, as superintendent, I made the decision that we would absolutely follow the recommendations of the engineer.”
Creech Road was a prototype design so Wake checked other schools that used the same design. Problems were found at Davis Drive and Durant Road.
Some of the deficiencies were in the walls and couldn’t be seen without X-raying them, Taylor said.
A fourth Wake school used the same design as Creech Road, but Taylor said no issues were found there because it was properly built to the design specifications.
Can Wake sue for negligence?
Creech Road was built in 1991, Durant Road in 1992 and Davis Drive in 1994.
Taylor said structural engineers found problems such as not enough rebar and grouting being used and beam connection points were omitted.
Rod Malone, Wake’s school board attorney, said it would normally be beyond the time period for when Wake could seek damages from the companies that built the schools. But he said they’re researching whether the work constitutes wanton and willful negligence that could lead to legal action.
“Given how obvious some of these defects may have been, was it willful and wanton negligence for the contractor to not have completed the work as installed,” Malone told the board. “That’s what we’re trying to work through at this point.”
Taylor said the district is working to identify which contractors worked on Creech Road, Davis Drive and Durant Road more than 30 years ago.
“We certainly want to hold any person accountable for public tax dollars, meaning that if you are a general contractor or subcontractor, at any moment that I determine that you’re doing something that’s not based on a signed negotiation that we have a contract, you won’t be working with Wake County anymore,” Taylor told reporters. “We’ll certainly be sharing that with other people as well.”
