Ceremonial lobby in new school will honor Ligon Middle's legacy

A committee of Wake school leaders and Ligon Magnet Middle School community members will move forward with plans for a ceremonial lobby honoring the 73-year-old school's history, as the district plans to demolish and rebuild the school.

On Tuesday, the school board favored that plan after hearing three ideas to honor the school's history from a Ligon "Legacy Committee" representative, who said the lobby was generally the most favored of the three ideas.

School board members, including Ligon's board representative Toshiba Rice, said Tuesday they were satisfied with the committee's ideas, because they appeared to take community concerns to heart.

"I'm really happy with the direction that this is going," Board Vice Chairman Sam Hershey said.

The school board voted earlier this year to demolish and rebuild the school, which has both an outdated facility design and needed renovations. As a part of that vote, board members asked the district to include a tribute to the school's history in its final design plan. The entire project is estimated to cost about $121 million, though it's unclear how the different tributes could affect that total.

The school was built in 1953, serving the Raleigh school system as the only Black high school.

It was desegregated in 1971 and turned into a junior high school, later merging into the Wake County Public School System after the 1976 merger of the city and county districts.

It became a magnet school in 1982, part of a school system effort to integrate schools by attracting interest from across neighborhoods.

The school's magnet program specializes in gifted and talented, and academically and intellectually gifted programming.

The "Legacy Committee" has met twice in recent weeks to find ways to tell the school's story.

The project has a couple of constraints. Namely, the older campus isn't sized to modern standards --- 17 acres versus 24 acres --- and the new school will be larger than the old one, sized to meet modern space standards and enrollment needs. It will also have expanded pick-up and drop-off space.

The three schemes differed in how the rebuilt school buildings would have been arranged on the campus.

The idea that will move forward, called Scheme A, will be a ceremonial lobby showcasing history. It would start facing Haywood Street and pass through to the outdoor athletic fields, and go by the gym, auditorium, cafeteria and arts buildings.

The two that fell out of favor would have had the three-story classroom building located in other spots that the committee didn't like. That was in part because of the way daylight would have hit the windows.

Scheme B would have created a courtyard that would have included historical information at its entrance. The courtyard would have touch all six buildings. The classroom building would have faced homes in the neighborhood, which committee members didn't think would be appealing to neighbors.

Scheme C would have included historical tributes in two hallways between buildings. The school would have faced the old site of the school, and the classroom building would have faced Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

All three schemes would have had a different location of orientation of the new buildings.

Schemes B and C would have had the same orientation of the buildings, but Scheme B would have them in the middle of the property, and Scheme C would have had the buildings sitting adjacent to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on the south side of the campus. Scheme C would have had shorter carpool and bus lanes.

Schemes B and C would have required two nighttime entrances for athletics and performing arts events, because the two buildings would be on different sides of the campus. Scheme A would only need one entrance at night because the gym and auditorium would be across the ceremonial lobby from each other.

The district also needs to decide on the historical design elements that would be a part of any tribute. Those could be murals, photographs of important figures in school history, timelines, quotations, an alumni pavilion, or the reuse of current features seen as emblematic of the school.

The committee is scheduled to meet again on June 10 and will meet at least two more times after that.

Over the summer, they'll continue to gather information on what current features of the building could be repurposed and reused in the new building as artifacts.

The district plans to start construction in the summer of 2027 on the site of the current outdoor athletic fields. The new building would open in 2030, but without the outdoor athletic fields ready. Those would be completed by next summer.