THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, April 5, 1996 TAG: 9604050528
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MANTEO LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
By fall, Manteo High School will be so crowded that administrators will have to add four additional mobile classrooms behind the main building. Four temporary units already are lined up behind the school.
An average of 28 students attend each class in the trailers, education officials said Wednesday night.
Three studies have recommended that the School Board build a third Dare County high school - somewhere on the beach - by 1998. This year, Manteo High has 142 more students than the peak capacity suggested by the state Department of Public Instruction. Nonetheless, education officials said, construction on a Kill Devil Hills high school probably won't begin until 1999 at the earliest.
``Each additional mobile classroom is a visible demonstration of how much over capacity we already are at Manteo High School,'' board member Fletcher Willey said Thursday.
``And those temporary units won't help alleviate the crowding in school halls, in bathrooms or at the library.''
Manteo's Board of Commissioners approved plans to erect the 24-by-36-foot mobile classrooms during their Wednesday night meeting.
Also at the meeting, commissioners voted to allow school officials to remove undergrowth from a buffer area between Manteo High and Wingina Street.
Some residents said they wanted the bushes, vines and other undergrowth to stay because they helped keep car headlights at the school parking lot from illuminating their homes after late night basketball games.
But others worried that the thick brush hid students who were smoking - or committing school-ground violations.
``An adult citizen told me he saw a teenage couple having sex on that walkway,'' Manteo Commissioner Melvin Jackson said. ``We need to get it trimmed out so we can see through there while riding down the road. Someone's going to get killed back there.''
As an alternative that might please both parties, Commissioner Stuart Wescott suggested that ``anti-social vegetation, like yucca and cactus,'' might help buffer residences from headlights and - at the same time - ``cut such stuff out.''
Commissioner Curtis Creech said, instead, that low shrubs should be planted and allowed to grow ``short enough that you'd have to lay down on the ground behind them to smoke a cigarette.''
About a dozen people in the audience snickered at that response.
Then the board voted unanimously to allow school officials to do ``selective pruning'' on the undergrowth in front of the school. by CNB