GUILFORD COUNTY, N.C. — Guilford County Schools will build a new Community Education Center to address the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The space will offer tutoring, adult education, and community meeting rooms for students and adults. It is expected to open in 2024.
"The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted our communities and disrupted the workforce,” said outgoing Superintendent Dr. Sharon Contreras in a news release. “The new Community Education Center will increase the potential of accelerating learning by serving as a high-dosage tutoring hub for students and will provide professional, high-tech learning spaces for GCS teachers and leaders.”
The new facility, a partnership between GCS, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and North Carolina A&T State University, will be built at the Gateway Research Park's South Campus.
"The data consistently show that student learning suffered across the country during the worst of the COVID pandemic when in-person instruction was not available,” said North Carolina A&T Chancellor Harold L. Martin Sr. in a news release. “This center represents a pro-active approach to do something about it. Our multi-institution collaboration will directly impact the students and families of Guilford County, and North Carolina A&T is proud to be playing a significant role in that service to our neighbors and this community.”
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The goal of the new center is to go beyond just the pandemic impacts on students, something that will take time.
"When the pandemic first started we had lots of families that didn’t have access to Internet, didn’t have access to tutoring to any of the things that we know that our students needed. So we are really excited that this facility is going to be able to be used for a wide array of services to our students and their families," said Angie Henry, the Chief Financial Officer for GCS.
The Community Education Center will also provide job training for parents and community members.
"We also know that the impact (of the pandemic is) going to be generational," Henry said. "It impacted families, adults lost jobs and need job training. We know that there are students who weren’t able to complete their education because they may have had to go work so we need to offer the GED (education)."
The center is expected to cost $35 million to build and will be paid for through federal COVID-19 relief money. The recently signed North Carolina state budget also included a provision to allow Gateway Research Park to enter into a lease agreement with the Guilford County Board of Education for a minimum of 50 years.
Henry said with all of the work being done to renovate and built new facilities throughout the district, building a brand new center made the most sense in that area of Guilford County.
"We are doing a lot of replacing of buildings in this area so we really didn’t have a site already in mind that we could renovate simply because of the condition of our buildings in this area of the county," said Henry.