breaking news commercial real estate education A bulldozer in the woods: How Olde Providence neighbors learned about CMS plans for a new south Charlotte high school

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Retired Olde Providence resident Mike Wall, 72, shows the path a small bulldozer took in the woods behind his home. It was the first indication he and neighbors had that CMS might build a new high school there.

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by Tony Mecia

On Thursday afternoon, Mike Wall was trimming his lawn in his backyard. When you’re 72 and retired, that’s the sort of thing you can do on Thursday afternoons, when your younger neighbors are at work.

When he turned off his trimmer, he heard an unfamiliar rumbling noise in the woods behind his house. The woods behind Olde Providence Elementary are a place where neighbors walk their dogs, where deer roam and where neighbors maintain the trails that their kids use to walk to school. The woods are in the back 1/4 of a 40-acre lot that also contains the school, several baseball fields and a football field.

The sound Wall heard that afternoon sounded like a big piece of machinery. He looked and saw a “mini-bulldozer” cutting a path about 50 yards behind his house. “I thought, ‘What the hell are they doing to our woods?’”

The rumbling of heavy equipment in the Olde Providence woods last week was the first indication of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ plans for a new high school in south Charlotte. The discovery of the bulldozer set into motion a chain of events – neighborhood alarm, calls to public officials, a social-media frenzy – that led to the revelation that CMS is looking seriously at building a new high school behind Olde Providence Elementary on Rea Road.

The Ledger was the first media outlet to report on the possible site on Saturday afternoon. One school board member, Sean Strain, told the Ledger there are four potential sites but that CMS staff seems to prefer Olde Providence – though the board hasn’t discussed the issue recently. A second school board member, Margaret Marshall, told the Ledger in an email Sunday night that the Olde Providence site is one option, that land in south Charlotte is expensive and that “no final decision has been made.” She added: “We are open to other options and invite folks to give us any leads on large tracts of land we might consider.”

The debate over the site for the school is significant in a number of ways. It will require the shifting of assignment boundaries for thousands of CMS students in south Charlotte – most likely in the Ardrey Kell, Myers Park, South Meck and Providence attendance areas. It will affect land prices, property values and traffic. And it could be one of the first controversies of Superintendent Earnest Winston’s tenure – and show how he balances the concerns of angry neighbors and parents against the wishes of his staff and the board that hired him.

In a fast-growing city, the drama that played out in Olde Providence in the last few days is a familiar Charlotte story of neighbors learning of possible development not far from their backyards – and racing to mobilize against it.

The search for answers

When he realized there was a mini-bulldozer in the woods on Thursday afternoon, Wall says he went to change out of his sandals to go find out what was going on.

The Olde Providence neighborhood is off Rea Road between Providence and Colony in south Charlotte.

“I thought, maybe he’s just moving some of these old trees that looked like they were going to fall down,” he recalls. “I saw him, and I said, ‘Can you tell me what you’re doing?’ And he said, ‘They want to cut these whole woods down and redevelop it.’”

Wall said he couldn’t believe it. The neighborhood had fought to preserve the woods years ago, but Wall thought those battles were in the past: “I was shell-shocked when I walked back there. I walked away, and I was just fuming.”

He went two doors down to the house of Addison Shonts, a 33-year-old controller for an international distribution company who is known for being in the loop on neighborhood news. Shonts and his wife have three kids, including two at Olde Providence. But Shonts had no clue why there was a small bulldozer in the woods.

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The two went back to the woods to investigate. The machinery and its operator were gone. But they discovered that it wasn’t just a couple trees knocked down – it was 10-foot-wide swaths of earth, hundreds of yards long, that had pushed down trees, tipped over wooden seats neighbors had built and erased the logs that they had put down as path markers.

Shonts then started making calls, first to state Rep. Brandon Lofton, whom he knew personally. Then to City Council member Ed Driggs. Then to the city arborist. The arborist confirmed that permits had been pulled to take down some trees, but otherwise nobody had much information. The Olde Providence PTA said it didn’t know anything, either. The school’s principal knew only that there was to be some minor work in the woods.

Shonts said Driggs called back Friday with the news that CMS was considering the site for a new high school and that the tree demolition was connected to soil testing in the woods.

When Shonts went to the local swim and tennis club, Windyrush Country Club, on Friday, he came across a bunch of moms from the neighborhood and told them what he had learned. “After you let them know, it spreads pretty quickly,” he said, making an up-and-down talking motion with his hand.

By then, discussion of the bulldozer in the woods was blowing up on Facebook groups and on the neighborhood’s Nextdoor social network: “I love the woods and walk there all the time with my dog,” one wrote. “What can we do to stop this from happening?” asked another. “What?!? We have been told repeatedly that there is not a big enough footprint for this,” another neighbor said.

One neighbor reported that she heard back from Marshall, the neighborhood’s school board representative. She quoted from what she said was a reply from Marshall that said: “It is looking like that is going to be the site for the new high school.” Asked to authenticate that statement by the Ledger on Sunday in an email, Marshall did not directly respond.

On Saturday night, former school board member Trent Merchant posted a long, eight-point analysis of the Olde Providence site on his Facebook page and offered advice to residents on how to engage school board members in conversations.

On a tour of the Olde Providence woods on Sunday, residents said the mini-bulldozer knocked over wooden seats they had built and obliterated some of the small logs that marked trails.

Concerns about traffic, property values, turtle homes

To many residents of Olde Providence, the idea of a high school on the site seems troublesome.

Financially, building a new school at Olde Providence could make some sense, since CMS already owns the land. Voters approved school bonds in 2017 to build a new high school in south Charlotte, and officials earmarked $110M for that project. But that now seems to be an insufficient amount to buy land and build. School officials and parents say a new high school is needed in south Charlotte because Ardrey Kell and South Meck are overcrowded and fast-growing.

Walking through the woods on Sunday morning, residents said they worry about the traffic on Rea Road, which at some points is just two lanes. They’re concerned about traffic and parking on their narrow neighborhood streets. And they don’t think building a high school at Olde Providence will save much money, either, since the school will probably have to include multi-story buildings, and workers would have to grade the sloping land between the ball fields and their houses.

As a buck ran by in the woods on Sunday morning, the group of neighbors said they also worry about the deer, squirrels, owls and hawks that live there. Shonts’ fourth-grade son, Thomas, bent over a small pond to point out a turtle. “They’d be destroying the homes of turtles if they bulldozed it,” he said.

Fourth-grader Thomas Shonts, behind his house, says he worries about the wildlife: “They’d be destroying the homes of turtles if they bulldozed it.”

There are also concerns, of course, about what will happen to property values. The neighborhood was built in the late 1960s, and most of the 50 or so houses that border the CMS property are valued between $350,000 and $400,000. Although living within walking distance to school can be seen as a plus, neighbors worry about the prospect of replacing the tranquil woods with a raucous high-school football stadium.

“I’ll bet you I’ll lose $100,000 in the value of my house,” Wall said. “Who’s going to buy a house with a stadium 75 feet behind it?”

Action plans

One of the things that bothers Olde Providence neighbors the most, they say, is that they learned of the possibility of the land as a high school only because the small bulldozer plowed through the woods. There was no discussion, no community meetings, no warning.

Even though officials say that no decisions have been made on a site for a high school, there’s a sense among neighbors here that plans might be farther along than CMS is letting on. Shonts said he puts odds that a high school will be built at Olde Providence at “about 80%.”

Asked about plans to fight, neighbors say they first need to share the news about what’s going on – maybe passing around fliers or holding a community meeting.

“We were caught a little flat-footed,” Shonts says. “I think the plan is still being formulated.”

Wall, though, said he knows this: “I think what you can expect is for the neighborhood to mobilize.”

Tony Mecia is editor of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter. Reach him at editor@cltledger.com.