Tornado-damaged school is donated to the City of Greensboro. Former Hampton Elementary site could become a park.

The district shuttered the school in 2018 after a tornado tore through East Greensboro. The school, opened in 1964, was already in poor shape before being damaged by the tornado. Rather than repairing it, district leaders settled on a plan to replace both Hampton and Peeler elementary schools with a new school on the former Peeler site.

Assistant City Manager Nasha McCray told school board members that the city is interested in pursuing a community use for the site, with input from the local community. Possible options, she said, could include a park, connector trail for area greenways, or some kind of community facility.

School leaders at one point considered the site for the location for a new staff training and community education center, to be financed with federal COVID-19 relief dollars. However, former Superintendent Sharon Contreras said school administrators eventually concluded the site was not as easily accessible as they would prefer for that purpose. Instead, the new center is planned to be located on Gateway Research Park’s South Campus on Gate City Boulevard.

Jill Wilson, the board’s attorney, told board members’ Tuesday they could make a very defensible argument that the gift would be fiscally responsible, given the ongoing costs the district is incurring for maintaining the empty building and property.

“An appraisal of the property that we did found it to be of relatively low value because of the cost of, let’s say, making the property pristine for public use,” Wilson said.

McCray said after the meeting that the city has been working with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality on an action plan for remediation of neighboring Bingham Park, which was once the site of a pre-regulation landfill. She said signs in the park warn visitors against digging in the dirt or getting in the creek, because of the possibility of coming into contact with potentially hazardous material.

Acquiring the Hampton Elementary site, she said is a, “natural tie-in to some of the efforts we are already working on.” She said it’s too soon to tell whether remediation would take place at the Hampton Elementary site as well.

During the earlier public comment period at Tuesday’s school board meeting, two Cottage Grove community members shared their thoughts on what they would like to see at the former Hampton Elementary site.

Alan Dale Hall, a representative from the Cottage Grove Neighborhood Association, said that one of the ideas his group had discussed is a community wellness center that could provide a place for children to play together and participate in health care programs.

Shirley M. Vanstory, another Cottage Grove community member, said she found it, “kind of disappointing” that the district chose not to rebuild the school on the site. But she said another idea that she had was that part of the site could be used for housing or helping youth aging out of foster care.

“A lot of those kids still need housing, they still need to grow up, they still need help,” she said.