Old Tensions Erupt in Effort to Move Forward on School Fixes
County and school officials have touted a renewed, unified push to make millions of dollars worth of repairs to public school buildings, but discord remains.
BREVARD — Kerry Putnam, demonstrating the critical need for repairs at Brevard High School, ended at a familiar spot: the arched beams supporting the roof of the school’s aptly named “old gym.”
After sticking a pocket knife deep into rotten wood at the base of one of the supports, he said, “the current recommendation is that we fill that up with epoxy and cover (the beams) with, like, a plastic coat.”
“Is that really what we want to do?” asked Putnam, Transylvania County Schools’ director of career-technical education and facilities.
“My Board wants a new cafeteria and a new gym,” he said during a tour of the High School last week, “and I can’t disagree with them.”
The two 65-year-old buildings have long served as the twin poster children for the crumbling state of Schools’ facilities. Now, six years after voters approved a $68-million bond package to renovate schools, these buildings send another message: For all the talk of collaboration and cooperation, the Transylvania County Commission and the county School Board are not totally on the same page.
After the Commission approved steps needed to start replacing leaky roofs and ancient ventilation systems last month, the county School Board green-lighted a similar list of fixes. But it also tacked on a request to seek $21.8 million in grant funding to replace the old gym and cafeteria.
Meanwhile, email exchanges between county and district staffers show ongoing disagreements about the approval and documentation needed for the funding of capital improvements.
It was an issue that boiled over at the March 25 Commission meeting, when a request from the district to shift funds from previously approved projects prompted a heated venting of old grievances.
Leaks and peeling paint are about poor school maintenance, said Commissioner Emmett Casciato, who also pointed a finger at principals for failing to alert elected leaders about such conditions.
“The principals need to step up to the plate and do their jobs,” he said.
Other commissioners revived the long-held complaint that the county — which controls local funding for schools — has devoted millions of dollars to work that was never done.
“You’ve destroyed these buildings, Board of Education,” said Commissioner Teresa McCall.
Even so, County Manager Jaime Laughter wrote last week in an email to NewsBeat, “We are on track!”
And maybe they are.
Both the Board and Commission are racing to secure funding for more than $40 million of the most urgently needed work before the end of the year.
At their March 11 meeting, commissioners pledged a “commitment to collaboration” with the Board and accepted a challenge from Laughter to “invest in our schools together.”
Even the most persistent critic of the Commission’s handling of this issue, former School Board member Alice Wellborn, sees signs of progress.
Though she remains dismayed that the focus of the planned work has shifted towards basic repairs and away from the ambitious modernization of Brevard High School and Rosman High and Middle schools envisioned with the 2018 referendum, she agreed “we need to get stuff fixed.”
And School Board Chair Kimsey Jackson said he was mirroring the feelings of both fellow Board members and Schools Superintendent Lisa Fletcher, when he identified the key to making this happen:
“I’m trying very hard not to talk about the past,” he said.
How We Got Here
Which might be difficult considering the two sides’ nearly decade-long fight over capital school funding.
As far back as 2015, a study by the Clark Nexsen architectural firm identified about $118 million dollars worth of needed upgrades of district buildings.
The Board crafted its 2018 referendum to address the Rosman and Brevard campuses because they needed the most work and because they serve as the district’s flagships, said Wellborn, who was on the Board at the time.
Board members settled on $68 million, she said, because they believed it was an amount voters would accept, which, overwhelmingly, they did.
It wasn’t enough.
Of the many delays in starting on the renovation project, the most crippling was the 2021 news that Covid-19-fueled inflation had pushed its costs $18.2 million over budget.
The Board approved an alternative, scaled-back renovation plan. So, eventually, did the Commission, but only after attaching conditions unacceptable to the Board.
This resulting stalemate was resolved by a 2022 agreement between the two sides that charted the current path forward: the hiring of a construction consulting firm, Georgia-based Axias, and the formation of an Education Capital Work Group that included Laughter and Fletcher, as well as a retired county manager and a superintendent of schools from Henderson County.
In a March 4 joint meeting of the Board and Commission, Laughter presented Axias’ list of $94 million worth of recommended repairs and the steps needed to complete them.
The first of these was the Commission’s March 11 approval of $47 million worth of work, including roofs and HVAC systems, with the aim of presenting a refined list of projects to the state Local Government Commission (LGC) in October.
Assuming the LGC grants approval, the county can quickly issue bonds for $62 million — the total needed to pay for both the first batch of repairs and “soft costs” such as engineering fees — and begin work before the end of the year.
Going forward, other sources of funding — including state grants and a potential second bond sale — will be explored for the remainder of the jobs Axias identified, including renovations of building interiors. If the district does not receive grant funding, future discussions can also include plans to replace the Brevard High gym and cafeteria.
For now, those projects serve as proof of one of the main points of the Clark Nexsen report — the soaring costs of school construction and, by extension, the high price of delay.
In 2015, the $118 million would have covered significant new construction, including the replacement of those 65-year-old buildings, the architects said.
Nine years later, the slightly higher price of the work Axias recommends — $121 million, including soft costs — reflects its report’s much more limited aims, identifying work needed to “stabilize and preserve the Transylvania County school facilities.”
The Need for Documentation
Which could have happened if the Schools had promptly and wisely spent the money the Commission has approved, county officials have long said.
This has been a standard argument of McCall and other commissioners, who have pointed out that the per-student school operational funding in Transylvania is among the highest in the state.
And beyond saying that schools have simply failed to maintain the buildings, commissioners have repeatedly expressed frustration that requests for funding come without adequate documentation — and that the work this money was supposed to pay for has been left undone.
It’s a complaint that goes back to at least 2020, when the Commission voted to demand budgets for all capital school projects costing more than $50,000.
Laughter provided several long threads of emails that were written as Axias was assessing school needs and that requested, for example, records of historic facility renovations and improvements to HVAC systems made with funds received through a federal Covid-relief program.
“Very few documents were produced and the work group included a recommendation on record keeping for that reason,” she wrote in an email to NewsBeat.
Other emails show the county informed district staffers that Board approval is needed before money can be shifted from one project to another, and they demonstrate, Laughter wrote, that Schools Finance Director Gabi Juba “has known about (this process) since at least Sept. 2022.”
Frustration over this lack of both this documentation and Board approval surfaced dramatically at the March 25 meeting when the Commission was presented with a request for reallocation of funds, including more than $1 million previously earmarked for HVAC systems at Rosman High School and TC Henderson elementary schools.
District staff had asked that this money instead be devoted to finishing similar work at Brevard elementary and middle schools, the subject of a $3.37 million contract signed in May of 2023 that the Commission didn’t previously know about — even though state law requires Commission approval for projects extending over more than one fiscal year.
The district had also provided so little information to support its requests that the county’s auditor had raised concerns, Laughter said.
“Additionally, I have concerns,” said Commission Chairman Jason Chappell. Funding for the work at TC Henderson was approved for the 2021-22 fiscal year, according to Laughter’s presentation.
The county was told of the urgent need to fix HVAC systems, Chappell said, and “commissioners said ‘Yes, we agree. That needs to be corrected. Here’s the funding. Go do it.”
But three years later, he concluded, “I’m not seeing any evidence that work was ever done.”
McCall wrote in an email clarifying her comments about the Board’s role in destroying schools that it stemmed from frustration about both the lack of ongoing maintenance and “the millions of dollars approved for capital projects while many projects continue to be delayed and/or not accomplished.”
An “Ambush?”
Actually, such commissioners’ comments were about making political points, said School Board member Bryan O’Neill, a Democratic candidate for the Commission.
He called the presentation a “deliberate ambush” and an example of commissioners “campaigning from the dais.”
In her letter responding to concerns raised by the Commission at the March 25 meeting, Fletcher wrote that Juba had sent the reallocation request nearly a month earlier “with the offer to answer any questions . . . There was no response and Ms. Juba assumed the requests were acceptable to county staff.”
Juba said that until recently she was not aware of the need to secure Board approval before forwarding funding requests. Though it might have been mentioned in past emails, she said, the county never provided a clear protocol detailing the process.
This gets to her general response to Laughter’s issues with the district; if there were problems with documentation or following procedure, she said, “someone just had to reach out for additional details.”
And lots of detailed information was provided, Fletcher wrote in an email, listing several specific examples of the district promptly responding to requests for documents from the county and Axias.
Her letter also echoed Juba’s message that the best way to prevent future disputes is to work together more closely. The letter included a recommendation for a specific funding protocol that isn’t substantially different from the one already in place, but it emphasized the need for district and county staff to “work collaboratively” to develop budget amendments.
“It is important to establish clear lines of communication,” she wrote.
If lack of communication is a familiar theme, so is the underlying reason Schools sought the reallocations the Commission objected to so strenuously: higher-than-expected construction costs.
The money earmarked for the Rosman and TC Henderson projects wasn’t enough to do the work, and in particular, “the TCHES project received no bids,” Fletcher wrote.
“In short, the use of the funds from these projects is needed to finish the BES and BMS projects, which will be completed this summer.”
Money for Ongoing Work
The good news, Fletcher said at Monday’s Commission meeting, is that almost all of the projects included in the current fiscal year’s budget “are either completed or underway.”
That budget was also bigger than it has been in the past.
School officials have previously decried the county’s standard practice of allocating the bare minimum to capital funding for the district — the Schools’ state-mandated share of local property taxes.
But last August, the Commission pledged to bolster capital funding, making $2.2 million available for priority projects by dipping into money raised by a 2020 increase in property taxes that was designed to cover future bond payments. That fund will contain about $21 million at the end of this fiscal year, Laughter wrote.
Fletcher, on Monday, proposed that the same amount of money budgeted this year would also be made available for fiscal year 2024-25.
This would allow the district to start work on the most urgently needed jobs that Axias identified, including the replacement of boilers at two schools that are in such bad shape, Putnam said, he is not even sure they could be fired up again in the fall.
“They’re DOA,” he said.
Yes, the district also received $220,000 this year for building maintenance, an amount intended to cover routine expenses such as replacing light bulbs and broken windows, Putnam said.
But in aging, deteriorating buildings this money is quickly consumed by bigger jobs, he said, For example, these funds were the main source of the nearly $28,000 in work orders needed to keep old boilers running, he said.
And at Brevard High last week, he stood in the intersection of two terrazzo-floored hallways, until recently the site of deep, diagonal crack that rendered one slab of flooring as unstable as “a bouncy ball,” Putnam said.
“I had to take about $18,000 of that $220,000 and have all of this torn up and put back so our children didn’t trip and fall over and hurt themselves.”
“Embarrassing” Conditions at Brevard High
Earlier that day, Brevard High Principal Mick Galloway, rebutted Casciato’s accusation of negligence by opening up his email inbox and bringing up long threads discussing dilapidated conditions.
“I’ve got emails that I’ve sent to every talking head in the county so people know what’s going on,” he said.
The public also received a dramatic message about leaks in the new gym two years ago, when a well-attended basketball game there was repeatedly delayed by rainwater dripping onto the floor, jeopardizing player safety, he said.
“It was embarrassing.”
That situation has since been remedied, but staffers have counted 44 ongoing leaks in the old gym, he said. “It’s a sieve. We’ve been putting in work orders for that roof for years.”
In the cafeteria, he pointed to peeling paint on the ceiling and black spots under a duct that appeared to be, he said, “either black mold or mildew.”
Students see such conditions. They see the peeling paint, the leaks, the desperate need for upgrades in restrooms, said Brevard High freshman Leo Stevens, and absorb the message sent by these deficiencies.
After moving to Brevard from New York state last year, he was excited about attending what he had heard was an excellent high school, he said, which made it all the more dismaying to find conditions that “definitely hinder our learning environment.”
He also noted the irony in the contrast between the state of the school building and the signs erected in the wake of student suicides assuring young people that they are loved and appreciated.
“It has left us feeling that we have no say in the matter,” Stevens said of his crumbling surroundings. “It has definitely contributed to the erosion of student mental health.”
Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com
Editor’s note: Another stunning story about Mission Health, this one featuring terrifying delays in treatment of a Brevard patient who came to Transylvania Regional Hospital needing emergency surgery.
We left Transylvania county, prior to our son entering middle school. After relocating to Westchester county, New York, we discovered our son was two years behind the children in our new school district. The Katonah Lewisboro School District, where we now live, pays teachers over six figures. Our annual budget is 120 million dollars, for a school is just under 1,000 students. Upon arrival, our son was swarmed with professional educators, who worked tirelessly to bring him up to the standard of our new school system. After school programs include coding, robotics, art and stem programs. Our athletic teams are well funded and our facilities are well maintained and state of the art. And it shows in academic performance. We have an almost 0 drop out rate. 98% of our kids go on to higher education, with the majority attending and graduating from top tier schools. We seen absolutely no fentanyl abuse, no methamphetamine abuse, bullying and teen pregnancy are rare. I currently coach at our school, and while interacting with the kids, they are hopeful and striving. These kids are not genetically superior to the kids in Transylvania county, but are fullly supported. Teachers are paid a living wage, with the senior most educators retiring at salary that is double the senior most educators in Transylvania county. Of course, are taxes are higher, but the results are demonstrative and positive. Our own son, who when we arrived in New York, was two years behind his peers, is not taking four AP classes and applying to top tier colleges. A large percentage of his peer group are applying to Ivy League universities, and being accepted.
When I read this article about the state of Transylvania county schools, and seeing the results of a school district, where we now live, that invests in education, we are confident (without a doubt) that we made the right choice to leave North Carolina.
Just prior to moving from TC, I was shouted at by local county official that “if you did it so much better up north, go back.” We did. And here in our current school district, they do it far better. Teachers aren’t seen at second jobs, bagging groceries to make ends meet. They are respected professional educators who nurture and develop the next generation of leaders.
What is happening here, in school districts like the Katonah Lewisboro school district, should be the norm across the country.
Sadly, the county commissioners of TC are still fomenting an education system that ill-prepares their students for the changing economy and standards of the larger world. Stop undervaluing your kids, TC.
The difference between what is available in TC, and what is available in better funded school districts is stark. You are not preparing your kids for factory jobs. THe world has changed, and so must you.
Quality of place infrastructure brings outside investment, and attracts educated industry leaders to the area. Six figure incomes for teachers is sustainable in areas like Westchester County, where average household income is 190,000 per year. It is not sustainable in rural American where people are struggling to survive. Everything boils down to economics. Janitors make a decent living, in areas where the median household income is high, and where there is an abundance of high paying jobs. And well paid professionals do not want to relocate to areas with abysmal school systems. If they do, they’ll send their kids to private schools and the public schools will continue to suffer. It’s a catch 22. The changes to TC, currently derived from investments in quality of place infrastructure, and investment in education, are the only way to rebuild the overall economy. Alas, with county government that suffers from backward notions rooted in a previous factory economy, it may be too late. The 42 million dollar grant takes no money from the school system. Revitalizing the area with young families, remote workers, and technology based industry is their only hope. Things like the Ecusta trail will only revitalize the area, bringing outside investment, young families, and professionals who rely on a very different economic paradigm than what existed in the past. When you base your economy on cigarette paper (that contributes to the death of your customer base) and outmoded technology, like X-ray film, your economy is doomed. I hope TC can catch up. Outdoor gear manufacturers are your best new hope. Hopefully TC is also putting in ubiquitous 5G Wi-Fi, so remote workers can function in the new economy. I say, build more trails. Attract outside investment. The County should have gotten started on this long before the factories closed.