One week after Mecklenburg County voters approved a record $2.5 billion in school bonds, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials identified the first eight projects the district will tackle:
- Replacement of the remaining old buildings at South Mecklenburg High, building on renovation and replacement work that began with 2017 bond money.
- Completion of renovations at Northwest School of the Arts, which began with money from the 2017 bonds. The new money will pay for new specialty classrooms, with plans to turn Northwest into an arts high school. The middle school students who now share the space would move to a renovated First Ward school.
- Replacement of old buildings and athletic fields at North Mecklenburg High.
- Construction of a new south Charlotte middle school, expected to open in 2025.
- Construction of a new Second Ward High in uptown Charlotte, which will be a health sciences magnet school.
- Renovations to Marie G. Davis school, which will then take the 7-12 Montessori magnet program currently housed at J.T. Williams.
- Building a new school next to Cotswold Elementary, with the third- through fifth-graders there joining the K-2 students at Billingsville Elementary during construction. When the new school opens it will house the combined Cotswold/Billingsville school and Chantilly Montessori will move into the Billingsville building.
- Moving Park Road Montessori into the Sedgefield Elementary School, which is currently called Dilworth Elementary’s Sedgefield campus, and moving the K-2 students from Sedgefield to join the grade 3-5 students at Dilworth’s Latta campus. The 74-year-old Park Road school will be demolished and eventually replaced with a new neighborhood school.
Board member Summer Nunn called the selection “a good mix of magnet schools that are very successful and places where I know we have overcrowding and some safety issues.” She asked Chief Operations Officer Brian Schultz for a time frame: “Is it something that’s going to happen this year, over the next two years?”
“We’ll have some timelines soon,” Schultz said. “We’re not quite ready to release that.”
But Schultz did say the plan calls for students to move out of Park Road Montessori and the Sedgefield students to move into Dilworth Latta in August. The board intends to hold a public hearing on that plan at a special meeting on Dec. 4 and vote on it Dec. 12.
The bond package includes 30 projects that will be launched during the next seven years. Schultz said decisions about what comes after the first eight projects will be tied to logistics.
