When it comes to selecting land for a high school to serve Rolesville, the town may feel like it’s between a rock and some hard heads.
The Wake County school system recommended sites that sit on embedded rock. In turn, Wake County commissioners rejected those sites because of the added cost — $2 million by most estimates — of removing or working around the bedrock.
Education officials will struggle to find a northern Wake County site without rock due to the Rolesville Grantic Batholith, commonly known here as the Rolesville pluton.
The underground rock formation covers 142 square miles across northern Wake, southern Franklin and northwestern Johnston counties. But it’s most abundant and closest to the surface in and around Rolesville.
The school system reports it reviewed 30 potential sites for a new high school. The last deal school leaders presented to county commissioners was 80 acres for $5.1 million (or $63,000 per acre), plus site-preparation costs ballooned by 23 percent due to rock removal.
The proposal was shot down in a hurry and commissioners then picked over its carcass. They don’t want to add costs to work around rock, and contend school leaders can do a better job of finding more affordable sites. Commissioners also allege the school system’s failure to select better sites makes voters less likely to approve future bond referendums.
While some of that may be accurate, commissioners need to consider there are very few Rolesville sites where rock isn’t prominent, and locations not requiring $2 million for rock removal may instead raise costs by $3 million to add water/sewer service. Pick your poison.
So while the school board and commissioners again fail to find common ground, construction costs rise, more families move into Rolesville and our schools become even more overcrowded.
To open the high school and accompanying elementary school on time in 2011, the school system needs a site chosen by next month. Otherwise, the opening would be delayed until the 2012-13 school year, effectively upping construction costs by $6.3 million due to inflation.
In other words, the reluctance by these two boards to work together will again cost you more money.
Rolesville needs a high school (not only for its population but to ease the jam-packed classrooms in Wake Forest and Knightdale as well), and students shouldn’t have to wait five more years to move in.
In this latest stalemate between the school board and county commissioners, something’s got to give — and it shouldn’t always be the taxpayers.
