Work complete at last 2 Wake schools with structural issues, set to open next week

The final two Wake County schools with structural deficiencies are now ready to open to students for the school year.

2026-08-20

Repairs at Creech Road Elementary in Garner and Davis Drive Elementary in Cary were completed Wednesday, according to the school district.

The schools will have teacher workdays to start for staff to get classrooms ready, and students will start school Aug. 25. That’s one day after the rest of the Wake County Public School System’s traditional calendar schools start.

The third school, Durant Road Elementary in Raleigh, reopened to students Tuesday after work was completed the week before. Durant Road Elementary is a year-round school that had started the first three weeks of its school year at traditional-calendar Abbotts Creek Elementary across the street.

All three schools were built using the same building plan back in the 1990s by three different main contractors.

The school system said they were not constructed according to those plans because of incomplete wall connections and reinforcement. That was a deficiency they said they only learned of just months ago after noticing a crack in the wall at Creech Road Elementary had grown much faster than inspectors expected based on normal settling cracks. After that, they x-rayed the school’s walls and discovered the issues, prompting them to conduct the same review at three other schools with the same building plan.

Superintendent Robert Taylor has said the district has different processes for supervising construction now, with district and county inspectors supervising construction while it’s happening. The repair work happened over just a month, and cost $5.6 million.

Problems in the schools

Taylor said problems were found in 12 classrooms and five other rooms at Creech Road: The front office, cafeteria, kitchen, stage and loading dock.

At all schools, engineers found, via X-rays of walls, that grouting and connectors were missing among beams and other structures, leaving them not bonded together. Those areas also didn't have enough rebar.

The structural problems were a new headache in the district, which has been fighting infrastructure challenges for years and hearing a bevy of concerns about them from staff, students and families.

Namely, they're dealing with poorly functioning heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems that have caused early dismissals at dozens of schools on extreme temperature days. School board members have acknowledged the problems and set aside more funding for facilities but still have about $800 million remaining in deferred maintenance.

What happens next

School board and district leaders are still working out whether they can take legal action over what they say was improper construction. Under one statute, they could be barred from making a claim more than three years after the schools were built. Under another, they would only have an avenue to sue so many years later if they could prove willful neglect on the part of the contractor --- essentially, that the contractor ignored obvious defects.