City signs recreation agreement with schools
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on November 25, 2015 1:46 PM
The city of Goldsboro has entered into an agreement with Wayne County Public Schools that will allow the city to use indoor and outdoor facilities at several schools in exchange for routine maintenance of school grounds.
WCPS will also be granted access to several city facilities, providing more areas for both entities to utilize for sports and events.
The city will be granted access to:
* Carver Heights Elementary School Gymnasium, to be used for Goldsboro Parks and Recreation youth basketball for practices and games during the year and during the summer months.
* Dillard Middle School Gymnasium, to be used for Goldsboro Parks and Recreation youth basketball for practices and games during the year and during the summer months.
* Greenwood Middle School Band Room, to be used by the Goldsboro Community Band program.
* Greenwood Middle School Gymnasium, to be used for Goldsboro Parks and Recreation youth basketball for practices and games.
* Wayne Academy Gymnasium, to be used for Goldsboro Parks and Recreation youth basketball for practices and games during the year and during the summer months.
* Wayne Academy football field and track, to be used for Goldsboro Parks and Recreation soccer events, games, and flag football practices.
WCPS will be granted access to these city facilities:
* Goldsboro Municipal Golf Course, to be used as the home facility for Goldsboro High School and Rosewood High School.
* Herman Park tennis courts, to be used as the home facility for Goldsboro High School and as a potential host site for high school conference and North Carolina High School Athletic Association regional tournaments.
* Mina Weil Park baseball and softball fields, to be used as the home facility for Dillard Middle School.
"This is something that's probably bigger than any of the construction projects that we've done, even the W.A. Foster Center, because this is something that's going to open up access to more indoor facilities than we could really ever build in a reasonable timeframe," said Parks and Recreation Director Scott Barnard. "Really what we're doing is leveraging one thing we want to get something we really, really want. So we're leveraging access to outdoor facilities and maintenance of those outdoor facilities to get access to indoor facilities."
Under the terms of the agreement, which is effective Jan. 1, 2016, city use of the aforementioned facilities must be scheduled to where events do not conflict with school-scheduled events, and vice versa for the school system's use of city facilities.
Both the city and the school system will be entitled to the receipts from concession sales at events held at the facilities, and each party will be responsible for the cost of operating the facilities that belong to them.
The city will have to pay a school system custodian at least one hour of pay for each day a city practice or game is held in a school facility.
With the extra access to facilities provided by the agreement, Barnard said the Parks and Recreation Department will be able to expand practice schedules for athletic teams and host new sports, such as volleyball, that require higher ceilings.
"It really does open up the opportunity for us to really give our existing teams a proper amount of practice," Barnard said. "We've really limited them to one practice, sometimes once every other week for our youth basketball league, so this gives us the opportunity to do what is kind of normal, which is to offer two practices a week, if not three or four practices, as well as having all your games played on a Saturday morning, rather than having games that run from 8 a.m. until well after dinner time."