THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, December 1, 1995 TAG: 9512010279
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY PERRY PARKS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: EDENTON LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
Leaky roofs. Trailer classrooms. No technology. High tax rates. Low tax bases. Growing debt.
A state commission studying North Carolina's school building needs heard it all Wednesday night from more than 200 representatives of Albemarle counties who came to plead for help in building much-needed schools.
It was the seventh public hearing in two months for the commission, and most of the members had heard it all before. But as key legislators and North Carolina's top two education officials tour the state, they gather irrefutable evidence from border to border of the pressing need for intervention from Raleigh.
"We're hearing a uniformity of comments," Moore County Sen. Fred M. Hobbs, co-chairman of the School Capital Construction Study Commission, said after a two-hour hearing in a crammed John A. Holmes High School auditorium.
"What I think is good for the commission is to hear it repetitively all across the state."
When they begin preparing a report to the General Assembly this month, the 20 commission members don't expect to debate whether the state needs to help counties pay for billions of dollars in construction, officials say. There seems to be a consensus that action is crucial.
The principal questions facing the panel, Hobbs said, are how to raise the money, and how to distribute it fairly among big, rich counties and little, poor ones.
"That balancing act is really where, I think, the crux of the work of the commission is going to come to bear," said Hobbs, a Democrat.
Major options being considered include issuing a statewide bond referendum, adding a penny to the sales tax or allowing localities to do so, calling for a vote on a state lottery whose proceeds would go to schools, or reshuffling budget priorities to leave counties with more money for school construction.
On Wednesday, more than 20 speakers from more than a dozen local school districts implored commissioners to develop a plan that would not penalize small, poor districts.
"The children of this state should no longer be held hostage to the geography in which they were born," said John Mitchener III, former chairman of the Edenton-Chowan school board. "A state that is divided between a poor 95 counties and a rich five counties is not a state that is going anywhere, except down the tubes."
Commission members have been sensitive to differences in resources among the counties they've visited. And commission member Joe Peel, superintendent of the Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Schools, had warned local officials that panelists would ask tough questions about what counties are willing to do for themselves.
Dare County School Board member Donna Buxton found herself on the hot seat after asking for help for her county, one of the wealthiest and fastest growing in the state.
Some audience members from poorer counties bristled when Buxton reported Dare's tax rate of about 44 cents per $100 valuation - some 30 to 50 cents less than rates mentioned by most of the other officials in the room.
Buxton said commission members ignored her explanation that most Dare residents also pay property taxes to the towns they live in, and that the county's valuations are considered high.
"I was surprised by the confrontational style of some of those on the commission," Buxton said Thursday. "We are concerned statewide about facilities, and we certainly understand the dilemma for northeastern North Carolina."
That dilemma was illustrated for commission members Wednesday during a tour of White Oak Elementary School in Tyner, where panelists saw a schoolyard filled with modular classrooms, and a building that was not equipped to handle new technology.
The commission also saw a video demonstrating construction problems across the Albemarle.
And speakers Wednesday eloquently detailed their needs, their indebtedness and their frustrations to the panel.
"To Chowan County, we thank you for hosting this thing," Camden County School Board Chairman David Meiggs said. "Camden would love to do it, but we don't have an auditorium."
The School Capital Construction Study Commission is charged with compiling a new survey of North Carolina's building needs and recommending how to meet them. An interim report is due Jan. 15, and a final report will be submitted April 15. by CNB