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Town OKs DuBois' school site plan
by Johnny Whitfield, Wake Weekly Associate Editor
Wake County can move forward with plans to erect a temporary school on the DuBois Center campus.
The Wake Forest planning board gave school officials the go-ahead for their plans Tuesday night but not before board members grilled school officials and engineers about the proposal. The temporary school has drawn criticism from many parents whose children will be reassigned to the school for up to two years while the county completes construction of Forest Pines Elementary School in the Wakefield community. But planning board chairman Bob Hill told his colleagues in front of a lightly-attended board meeting Tuesday that they should only consider whether the project meets the town's site plan requirements in making their decision to approve or reject the plan. The proposal calls for the construction of four classroom buildings, an administration and media center and a cafeteria. Each classroom building will have eight classrooms and restroom facilities for children and adults. Stacey Bailey, a traffic engineer contracted to study the impact of a school that will house up to 500 students, told planning board members that traffic would not be significantly impacted even at one of Wake Forest's most notorious bottlenecks -- the railroad underpass in front of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. "Most of these streets are not that heavily traveled, especially compared to some of the streets in Raleigh," Bailey said. Jade Litcher, the father of an eight-year-old son who will atttend the modular school for the next two years, disputed those claims. "The current traffic situation on the two major thoroughfares in the town of Wake Forest are horrendous to navigate from one side of town to the other," Litcher wrote in his memo to planning board members. Litcher said many parents will choose to drive their children to school rather than force them to ride buses that would take up to 45 minutes to make the trek from the Wakefield community to DuBois. Litcher said his son currently rides the bus home from school each afternoon. He said the one-mile bus ride from Wakefield to his home takes about 35 minutes. "Traffic and impact studies would show this to be a tremendous burden on the police department, residents and commutors," Litcher said. Litcher also said school officials seemed more focused on the safety of their buildings than on student safety. "They were talking about motion detectors. Those are going to protect the buildings at night. If motion detectors are turned on during the day, kids will set them off all the time," Litcher said. Gerald Core, the Wake County project manager, told planning board members that the buildings are all fire-proofed and that they meet state building codes. The planning board's newest member, Stephen Stoller, asked school officials if they planned to do anything to improve the plight of the existing buildings on the DuBois campus. Ken Fuller, the director of construction for the Wake County School system, said there were no plans to make improvements to existing buildings on the DuBois campus. "We can only spend money on things that we own. We're talking about tax money here," Fuller said. Hill explained that such matters really fell outside the scope of the site plan review regardless of what the school system's intentions were.
Last Updated On: February 3, 2005
Copyright 2005 The Wake Weekly