New beginning planned at old school

Wendell church buys boarded-up buildings to make a center for troubled teens

Members of Pleasant Grove Baptist Church fondly recall attending the old Carver School on Morphus Bridge Road in Wendell.

At the school in the 1940s, they learned the value of community service alongside mathematics.

Now, more than 60 years later, church members have a vision of sharing those lessons with a new generation in Wendell.

"This means so much for the community, and I see so many possibilities," said Pleasant Grove church member Mary Perry, who recalled walking three miles each day to attend the school.

Church members have been eyeing the land for awhile. In 2006, they made an offer to the Wake County Board of Education to purchase the property for $150,000. The school board approved the sale June 5.

Members of Pleasant Grove plan to turn the two boarded up buildings into a community center offering parenting classes and programs for wayward teens. Instead of renting out the Wendell Community Center for church events, members say they could use the buildings. The old school sits on a little more than 9 acres adjacent to the church property.

"We believe God ordained it to be an extension of the Pleasant Grove community," said Asa Bell, the church's pastor. Pleasant Grove is more than 100 years old. Many of the members either attended the old Carver school or taught there.

The old Carver School was originally named after George Washington Carver, an educator and researcher who taught former slaves and their descendants at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

The site had been vacant since students and staff moved to a new school on Liles-Dean Road in 1998. There have been a couple of offers to buy the property, but none panned out. School staff had looked at using the property as a pre-kindergarten center in 2000 and more recently as a bus parking/transportation center.

Mike Burris, Wake schools' assistant superintendent for facilities, said in an e-mail message that the site was too small and would be too expensive to renovate.

School board member Rosa Gill said she was pleased at the board's decision to sell the property to the church.

"Communities play a role in the success of students as well as schools," Gill said. "And any time we can help communities provide mechanisms to help train students, I am 100 percent behind it," she said.

School board members Ron Margiotta and Carol Parker, who voted against the sale, questioned the price. Margiotta said he thinks the property is worth more than $150,000.

"It sounds like a good cause, but we are not in the charitable business," he said. "We have to be good stewards of the taxpayers' money." He said he had e-mailed his fellow board members to reconsider.

"I am concerned that we will look back and say we made a bad decision," Parker added.

But Bell, an attorney with the Raleigh law firm Becton, Slifkin and Bell, said the church was moving forward. He said the church paid a fair price, and he said there was not a counteroffer for the property when it was advertised. Bell said that the deal would be final in about three months and that renovations would start shortly after.

It will take some work to renovate the two buildings. Bell estimates it will cost about $500,000 to fix up and start the programs. He said the church would look into pledges from corporations and the Wendell community.

But church members aren't deterred by the dollar amount. They say the benefits the center will have in the community outweigh the startup costs.

"It's always been a part of the community. It's like an extended family," Perry said.

(News researcher Lamara Williams-Hackett contributed to this report.)