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Winston-Salem Councilwoman Wants Closed School Building For Community Center

The former building for Hanes and Lowrance middle schools. PAUL GARBER/WFDD FILE

It's been six years since Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools closed the Hanes-Lowrance middle school building after it was found to be sitting on top of a plume of toxic waste.

Now Winston-Salem Councilwoman Barbara Burke is requesting the deed to the building as a way of bringing change to the area. 

In a statement on social media, Barbara Burke says the facility is slated to be used as a garage and maintenance spot for buses. Burke says it would be better used as city-owned property for community service programs.

She says the one-stop center could be used for economic development and empowerment programs and also help address housing needs.

The property is on a tract of land flanked by industrial sites on Indiana Avenue in Burke's Northeast Ward.

Revelations about the contamination led the school system to close the building during the school year in 2015 after parents raised concerns about their children's safety.

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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