Christopher Lugo
editor@highlandsnews.com
The Macon County School district was part of the 48 other school districts that were rejected from $400 million worth of grants provided by the North Carolina Education Lottery.
This year, 76 districts applied for help with needs totaling $2.7 billion.
Macon County Schools superintendent Dr. Chris Baldwin said their grant request was to build a new Franklin High School costing $50 million.
“The reason we applied for this is because it is an opportunity for the county to receive $50 million towards the construction of a new school,” Baldwin said. “Obviously $50 million is a huge reward for the county.”
There are several things that Baldwin said warrants a new Franklin High School.
“Primarily, you have a 70-year-old facility in the main building and the gym,” Baldwin said. “The other five outlying buildings are anywhere from 20 to 50 years old. There are significant infrastructure issues with a facility that is that old.”
Another significant challenge with the campus is the multi-level buildings that cause issues for students with disabilities.
“With the different elevations that students must travel between those seven primary academic buildings, there is a lot of distance that they have to travel, and it is a very uneven campus,” Baldwin said. “For a child with mobility issues, it is pretty significant. It results in a loss of instruction time for those students.”
On the application for the grants, the school district has to fill out the tax rate of the county, the property values and the tier status of the county also is a factor on which district gets the grant.
“The priorities that were considered for the needs-based public school capital fund, number one was counties that were designated with a tier one status,” Baldwin said. “Then, the second priority was counties with greater need and less ability to generate sales tax and property tax revenue. In terms of property values, Macon County ranks sixth in the state. So, that is something that is going to be a disqualifier for a lot of these grants. When you factor in that we have one of the lowest millage rates in the state, when these folks that are determining who to award these grants to, it is a disqualifier for us, for sure.”
Moving forward, Baldwin said that they are going to continue to apply for any grants that will help fund the project, but they have a team of architects looking into how they can improve the campus they already have at FHS.
“Right now, we do have a group of architects that are going through each of the eight facilities and are identifying the primary infrastructure issues within each of those issues,” Baldwin said. “They are also determining what the cost of renovating those buildings will be to bring them up to code. We are looking carefully at the 28 systems that were awarded grants to put ourselves in a better position, so we hopefully receive some of this grant money. We are also looking for any other grant opportunities that we can find. The challenge for Macon County is that our property values are high, but if you look at the median household income, we are not as high. So, that makes it tough to raise taxes because of the median household income. I hope we can make that known when we apply for these grants in the future.”