New school will start in mobile classrooms for K-2
Mebane’s planning board gave the first step of approval Monday night for rezoning at the corner of West Ten and Rock Quarry roads on the outskirts of the city for a new charter school, Mebane’s first. The rezoning is for R-20, a residential designation that also allows for a school, provided that a special use permit is approved.
The new charter school will be called Carolina Achieve, its board chairman, John Oxaal, had previously told The Alamance News.
The site is in far western Orange County, on the eastern outskirts of Mebane’s current city limits.
The 15.7-acre lot is laid out with a 3/4 mile-long driveway that weaves through the site for drop-off and pick-up of students. A one-way entrance, with two lanes, will be along Rock Quarry Road, gradually expand to three lanes, condense back down to two lanes, and then exit onto West Ten Road. It was estimated that the length of the long driveway (3,450 feet) would allow 153 cars.
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Much of the planning board’s discussion was on receiving assurances that the line of traffic would not back out into the public roadway – which has become a problem, several members noted, at various local public schools.
There are two parking lots, one with 72 spaces off West Ten Road and a second one, with 147 spaces, closer to Rock Quarry Road.
The charter school, at its final stage of development, is expected to have approximately 900 students – with attendance expected to be drawn, its sponsors said, from Alamance, Orange, and Durham counties.
There will be three school buses, and a parking lot for them at the school. It is expected that the buses will stop at remote locations to pick up groups of students who will be brought to the school, not by stopping at individual houses like traditional public school buses.
According to the plans laid out for the planning board Monday night, there will be at least two phases to construction.
In the initial phase, three mobile classrooms will be installed to house kindergarten through grade four students – although only kindergarten through grade two will be present at the school’s initial opening.
In the second phase, a three-story building will be built with an expansion expected to reach eighth grade.
The special use permit being sought in Mebane includes only kindergarten through eighth grade, but the state approval for the charter school includes up through 12th grade.
Steve Hubrich, who made most of the presentation to the planning board, made clear their ultimate hope is to include a high school, probably by adding one grade level per year after the K-2 school is started.
However, doing so will necessitate a return to the city council for a revised special use permit to allow expansion to include a high school.
It was noted that there is additional open space on the lot – including around a planned soccer field – to expand for a potential high school building, as well as the possibility that the charter school may buy additional acreage adjacent to the property.
There will be buffering on sides of the largely triangular lot that back up to other residential properties, Hubrich said, by leaving mature trees already along the edge of the property.
The planning board approved the R-20 rezoning and the special use permit by unanimous 8-0 votes. Voting in favor were new board chairman Judy Taylor, vice chairman Kurt Pearson, and members Ed Tulauskas, Gale Pettiford, William Chapman, David Scott, Keith Hoover, and Colin Cannell. Susan Semonite was absent.
Mebane’s city council will take up the rezoning and special use permit, as well as a request for annexation of the property (a prerequisite for the rezoning and special use considerations), at its October 7 meeting.
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Background on Carolina Achieve
Carolina Achieve was founded by John Oxaal and his wife, Marjorie, who are Durham County residents, according to the charter school’s website. Oxaal describes himself as an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist who has started and/or funded more than 15-high tech and life science-based companies, and his wife Marjorie as having had a “long career on Wall Street and in corporate appraisal” who now manages a real estate and property operations firm. The other founder of Carolina Achieve is Tiffany Alrefae, who describes herself as having a career in charter school education leadership that has spanned 18 years and three countries.
Carolina Achieve also had been involved in an earlier iteration of the same charter school that had been proposed for 85 acres of vacant land along Lawrence Road in Hillsborough last year but failed to win the Orange County commissioners’ approval of a zoning change needed to proceed with construction of two school buildings, a K-8 school operated by Carolina Achieve, and the West Triangle High School, John Oxaal recalled in an interview with The Alamance News earlier this year.
Earlier this year, Oxaal said that rather than open as a STEM-based high school, Carolina Achieve plans to open the new charter school in August 2025 for an initial enrollment of up to 300 students, or 100 students per grade, in kindergarten through second grade; additional grades would be added during each successive year of operation, Oxaal previously described for the newspapear. “We’re going to add one grade per year until we get through high school,” the board chairman said.
The board for Carolina Achieve hopes to break ground on the site this fall, Oxaal explained in a May interview with the newspaper. The initial plan is to start out with modular structures, to be followed by the construction of a brick-and-mortar school building within a few years, he said. Hubrich Contracting of Durham, a construction company specializing in charter school facilities that has built other nearby charter schools, has agreed to build the future school for Carolina Achieve, Oxaal said. Steve Hubrich of Hubrich Contracting made much of Monday night’s presentation.
Carolina Achieve plans to focus its curriculum “on the interconnectedness of language arts, mathematics, and science and their application beyond the classroom,” which would be complemented by arts, P.E., entrepreneurial, and other areas of instruction, according to a description from the school. Carolina Achieve intends to develop a school environment that fosters strong parental involvement; physical and mental well-being; and skills, mindsets, and behaviors designed to position students for lifelong success.
Oxaal said that Carolina Achieve will differentiate itself from other traditional K-12 public schools and charter schools through its emphasis on rigorous academic offerings and “an overlay of entrepreneurial studies that will give our students a focus” and teach them habits needed to be successful “in every walk of life.”
“I really want children of middle class and lower middle class backgrounds to have really good educational opportunities,” Oxaal said in explaining his interest in founding a charter school. “The reception we’ve gotten in Mebane and Alamance County has been really wonderful.”
Carolina Achieve hopes to begin enrolling its first students via an admissions lottery that will open in January 2025, Oxaal had earlier described for the newspaper.
Other founding board members for Carolina Achieve include: MaKayla Booker of Durham and Atlanta, executive director of a company called Wall Street Juniors; Dr. Dwayne Campbell of Durham, who previously worked as a director at the at the Emily Krzyzewski Center in Durham and currently works with an organization in Durham called FUSE; Jeff Clark, a venture capitalist based in Research Triangle Park; Charles Lopez of Mebane, who unsuccessfully ran for Mebane city council in 2021 and the state house in 2022 and whose online resume lists him as the “head of people” for Greenscape, a commercial landscaping and property management company in Raleigh; Anjanette Miller, CEO of echo business consulting and services in Durham; and Tom Nechyba of Durham, a professor of economics at Duke University.
The proposed site is currently owned by Deborah Neese Hawkins of Stuart, Virginia, according to Orange County’s Register of Deeds. The latest appraised value for the property is listed at $123,308, according to Orange County tax records, which show that the current owner, Hawkins, is receiving an agricultural tax credit of $113,457, reducing the actual assessed value for the property to $9,851.
Alamance-Burlington school officials had told school board members during their budget discussions earlier this spring that ABSS is likely to lose students, as well as state per-pupil funding, when the new charter school opens in Mebane, which school officials said at the time they understood would open this August.
