Healthy Start move 'a slap in the face,' says councilman

By Ray Gronberg

gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648

DURHAM -- A local charter school has applied for the permits it needs to demolish two Jackson Street bungalows that neighbors and at least some City Council would rather see preserved.

The application from the Healthy Start Academy reached officials Tuesday morning. Approval is expected but likely to occur no sooner than a week from today, according to City/County Planning Director Steve Medlin.

Healthy Start leaders put in for the permits after fulfilling a council request that they meet with city/county planners and building inspectors to see if there's another place to put the playground the school wants to build where the bungalows now stand.

Though city/county officials identified four possibilities, none "were palatable to the school," Medlin said in a Tuesday report to City Manager Tom Bonfield.

The school's executive director, Liz Morey, confirmed that she'd asked Healthy Start's real estate agent to submit the permit application. "There's nothing else to do," she said.

But the move sparked criticism from City Councilman Eugene Brown, the leading critic among elected officials of the planned demolition.

"This is a slap in the face to the neighborhood and to the City Council and to all good citizens of Durham who are interested in revitalizing our inner-city neighborhoods," Brown said shortly after learning of the application.

Critics of the school's plan maintain that bungalows could easily be renovated and sold. They oppose demolition because the houses are part of the Morehead Hill historic district, in an area listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and stand on a block that's entirely residential.

But Morey has signaled that to her and other leaders of the school, the Jackson Street parcels are most valuable for their land. She's said flatly that they're not interested in giving it up.

"The land is very valuable to us," Morey said again on Tuesday. "Once you sell it, you're never going to be able to get it back for the price you paid for it."

Morey added that based on past dealings with neighbors, she suspects several of the alternative playground sites city officials suggested would cause the school additional public relations problems.

The city's apparent leverage over the school is limited. Healthy Start has waited out a yearlong cooling-off period ordered by Durham's Historic Preservation Commission, so issuance of the demolition permits is largely a formality.

The school would need to work around or convince the city to abandon a public right of way that runs between the Jackson Street bungalows. Critics have already urged the council to hold firm against surrendering the right of way.

Brown, looking for other ways to prod school leaders to back down, has also latched onto the possibility that its stance could erode public support for Healthy Start Academy or for the state's experiment with charter schools generally.

He has noted repeatedly that Healthy Start's test scores stack up poorly against those of other schools.

The most recent figures, for the 2008-09 school year, show that only 38.7 percent of its students passed end-of-grade reading tests and 49.2 percent passed the equivalent math tests. Statewide passing rates were 67.6 percent and 80 percent, respectively.

Brown also questions how accountable Healthy Start and other charter schools are for the use of public money. They receive per-pupil allocations of local, state and federal aid the same as public schools, but unlike public schools don't answer to local elected officials for the use of those funds.

"Legally, they have the right to be doing what they're doing," Brown said, adding without going into specifics that he intends to talk to state officials about the situation. "But all of us need to remember that [this] is a charter school, not a private school."