GUILFORD COUNTY, N.C. — Guilford County Board of Commissioners Chairman, Alan Branson gave the Annual "State of the County" Address at Thursday's regularly scheduled Board of County Commissioners meeting.
The address is an opportunity to look back on the past year and highlight accomplishments and progress in Guilford County.
Any other year, the address would have focused on topics such as economic growth, and battling the opioid crisis.
But this time around, Gateway Education Center took center stage. Gateway advocates flooded the meeting and took up the majority of the hours-long meeting.
Parents of students at the special needs school took to the podium one-by- one to plead their case; fixing the school they love, rather than closing it.
"Until you have this happen to you, you can sit there and say 'so we'll close the school oh well parents go somewhere else' - well that's not the case!" One grandmother said.
"Think outside the box, and come up with funds immediately to fix our beloved school," a parent echoed.
"We're not going to throw it all away because we can't fix a roof," Dania Ermentrout, PTA President at Gateway Education Center said.
County Commissioners were supposed to vote on 7 million dollars for school projects.
The money would've renovated a handful of high schools to house career classrooms, like manufacturing and engineering labs.
But this vote never happened.
What happened instead was a long back-and-forth discussion on postponing the vote to see if some of the money could be used to fix Gateway.
The commissioners agreed unanimously, they needed more time to think about it.
"I can't vote on 7 million dollars tonight, with all these issues with Gateway that are unanswered," Commissioner Hank Henning said.
"We've got to be careful, more careful about how we come to these decisions and the time in which we do it," another commissioner said.
The vote has been postponed until May 16 after much debate.
In the meantime, the commissioners say they’ll be meeting with the Board of Education to try to find a win-win solution to what’s become a "dissapointing and heartbreaking situation," - in their words.