Wake County town expected to finally get a high school bearing its name
A high school will soon be named after the fast-growing western Wake County town of Morrisville.
The Wake County school board’s facilities committee recommended Wednesday naming the school Morrisville High when it’s scheduled to open in 2027.
School board vice chair Chris Heagarty said Morrisville town leaders and residents would embrace the name.
“The majority of the residents and the Town Council feel a lot of civic pride around the idea of a Morrisville High School and would like to see it named Morrisville High School,” said Heagarty, who represents Morrisville on the board.
The full board is expected to vote on the school name on June 6.
Once it’s approved, only the towns of Wendell and Zebulon would not have a high school named after their municipalities. Neither have a district high school in their town limits.
Finding land for Morrisville schools
Due to high land prices, Morrisville didn’t get its first district high school until this school year when the Wake Early College of Information and Biotechnologies opened on Wake Technical Community College’s RTP campus. Even then, Heagarty noted that some town leaders had wanted to name that school after the town.
The school board recently finished acquiring another 34 acres on Wake Tech’s RTP campus for a second high school in Morrisville. Due to the small size of the site, the high school could use a baseball field that might be built in Mills Park in Cary.
On Wednesday, school facilities staff proposed three names: Paramount Parkway High, Parkside High and Morrisville High.
“In the past, board by board have varying positions on whether they want to name it with a town as its name in the title,” said Betty Parker, the district’s senior director of real estate services.
Parker said using the town in the name could lead to the “implicit expectation” from Morrisville residents that they’d attend that school.
Parker said a similar thing could happen if they named it Parkside High because of the presence of nearby Parkside Elementary and the future Parkside Middle.
Paramount Parkway recommended
Paramount Parkway, which is the main road that would be used to access the new school, was recommended because it was a “fairly neutral” option to get the conversation started, Parker said.
“Perfect name suggestions are rare, and this is no exception,” Parker said.
School board chair Lindsay Mahaffey quipped that “PPHS is not going to look good on your branding.”
Heagarty said many parents wouldn’t be familiar with the name of Paramount Parkway. He said the whole community would rally around Morrisville High.
Unlike past boards that objected to using town names for new schools, five of the nine members were newly elected in November.
“We’re going to have that constant battle of folks assuming ownership of that and that they get to go there because they live there,” said new board member Lynn Edmonds. “I understand that challenge but not so much so that we shouldn’t do it.”
This story was originally published May 11, 2023 at 5:45 AM.
