In about three weeks, students will leave Park Road Montessori School for the last time. The 75-year-old building will be demolished and eventually replaced. It’s one of the first projects being delivered as part of the $2.5 billion Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ bond package that voters approved last year.
Sixth-grader Celia Kaul says she understands why it’s time for the school she’s attended for seven years to be torn down.
“This school was built when the Cold War was still going on. So we actually have a bomb shelter beneath our school,” she said, laughing.
That’s actually a school myth, based on the fact that the school itself was designated as a bomb shelter in the 1950s, and has an old boiler room that dates back to coal-fired heat. But there are real challenges with the aging school, which doesn’t have space for all the prekindergarten through sixth grade students in the popular magnet program.
The upper grades attend classes in trailers, where heating and cooling can be erratic, she says. And then there’s the storm drain that overflows when it rains. Celia says everyone assumed it was runoff. But a few weeks ago, “toilet paper started coming out of it. And it didn’t smell so good.”
So Celia isn’t upset that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is preparing to move her south Charlotte magnet school to a newer, bigger school at Sedgefield Elementary, about two miles away. But Park Road Montessori is more than just buildings and trailers.
It’s nestled in a 15-acre wooded campus, just off one of Charlotte’s busiest roads. For more than 20 years, faculty and students have worked with Trees Charlotte to create a pocket of urban woodland.
“Park Road’s a great ecosystem,” said Celia, who’s 12. “We have a very wide range of animals and plants here. It’s just such a beautiful and treasured place.”
Tackling real-life challenges
The Montessori philosophy calls for schools to be rooted in nature and their community — and for students to explore real-world challenges. So Celia and her friend Ada Lee Smith set about figuring out how to make sure the trees aren’t leveled along with the buildings.
Ada Lee is in fifth grade, so she’ll move with the rest of the school to the new location at Sedgefield Elementary in August.
“I am excited,” the 11-year-old said. “But when I found out I was also really worried about the trees on this campus.”
Celia will advance to J.T. Williams Secondary Montessori School for seventh grade. She, too, wanted to find a way to save the trees.
“So we started printing up maps, we started looking through, like plans and everything. We were just trying to see the best ways to protect the trees even if they aren’t necessarily moving with us,” Celia said.
It was a perfect project for two girls who had bonded over their love of birds and nature. Teacher assistant Heather Ruckterstuhl helped them connect with CMS planners and the city’s Urban Forestry program. They learned to measure the circumference of trees about 4 feet off the ground and use that to estimate the root base.
“Any tree over 30 inches in diameter is considered a treasure tree and it has to have a 10-foot critical root zone,” Celia explained.
That’s important in knowing how much space a tree needs to avoid damage from nearby demolition and construction.
Ada Lee and Celia would like to preserve all of Park Road’s trees. But two “humongous trees” that predate the school are standouts.
An escape from the city
A deodar cedar in the traffic circle rises more than 50 feet high, with the carpool line circling it every day.
Celia and Ada Lee love to explore the carpet of needles beneath it, looking for cones that look like rosettes and mushrooms that sprout on a rainy day.
“If you look out there’s this big road and there’s cars and there’s, like, a neighborhood,” Celia said, standing beneath the cedar. “And they’re all going past, and over here it’s so peaceful and you can hear the birds chirping and you can smell everything. It’s almost like an escape from the city.”
The cedar is the school’s traditional gathering spot for Earth Day. Ruckterstuhl remembers Earth Day of 2020, when students were learning remotely because of COVID-19. A teacher videotaped herself painting a heart on the tree so students could feel like they were there.
“It was such a gift during a time when everyone was isolated and inside,” Ruckterstuhl said.
The painted red heart remains. Celia says that fits with the feeling she gets when she looks at the branches reaching down to earth: “It almost feels like it’s embracing you. Like giving you a hug.”
Celia wrote an essay about Park Road’s deodar cedar for an Urban Forestry competition. This spring Mayor Vi Lyles chose it as the Mayor’s Tree of the Year.
Can they be saved?
The other giant, a 50-foot live oak, isn’t as healthy as the cedar. It’s been struck by lightning, shows signs of rot and is tangled in vines.
“Looks like Virginia creeper to me. Does that look like Virginia creeper?” Celia asked Ruckterstuhl recently.
“Yeah, it looks like some kind of vine, like some kind of invasive vine,” Ruckterstuhl said.
And the live oak is close to the building that’s slated for demolition, which makes it tough to protect it.
Dennis LaCaria is in charge of CMS construction planning. When he visited Park Road recently, Celia asked him about protecting the roots.
“How would that work if you’re trying not to damage the tree while demolishing the building?” she asked. “Cause it’s like a 150-inch tree, so there’s probably at least a 50-foot critical root zone all around.”
LaCaria says saving the live oak is iffy.
“I don’t know whether we’ll be successful just because of the age and the condition of that tree,” he said. “It’s real close to the building, root structures underneath it, so there’s a lot of pieces that we don’t know yet.”
Celia has started an online petition to save the Park Road trees. It’s gotten more than 500 signatures.
But LaCaria says the challenge isn’t lack of awareness or will. It’s the practical aspects of protecting old trees, which tend to be fragile, during a massive construction project.
The architects designing the replacement of the Park Road building recently commissioned Heartwood Tree Services to evaluate prospects for saving the live oak and the cedar. The report concludes that removing them both “would be the best and safest option.” That’s because demolition and construction could damage the trees in ways that wouldn’t be immediately apparent, creating a risk to the new building, which is scheduled to open for neighborhood students in 2026.
But LaCaria says he believes the deodar cedar can be saved, even if it means a lot of extra work to protect the roots. And he says CMS recently got special zoning permission from the city to build the new school on the footprint of the old one. That should spare some of the smaller trees, he says.
“If we had had to go where the ordinance wanted us to go we would have taken down a whole bunch of trees here,” he said.
Thinking about the future
LaCaria says the way Celia and Ada Lee have worked with district staff to prepare for the transition is a model for how CMS would like to engage students and communities.
CMS will also work with the faculty and families who move to the Sedgefield location on developing it into a Montessori-friendly location. LaCaria says that means building more garden space, creating better access from classrooms, trying to relocate the “peace pagoda” that stands at the front of the current site, and possibly moving smaller trees that have special meaning.
Sedgefield has almost as much land as Park Road, and the 1950s building there was replaced in 2002.
Ada Lee says she’ll miss Park Road’s trees and wildlife, but she’s looking forward to the newer building.
And Celia said she’s OK with the move too — as long as the ancient cedar survives to welcome the new students.
“Because,” she said, “its beauty should be shared with everybody.”
