The Cumberland County Board of Education dedicated its meeting on Tuesday to four architecture teams to make their cases for designing the new E.E. Smith High School.
Across roughly three hours of interviews, board members watched renderings of multistory schools, studied possible layouts for the 27-acre campus, and heard four visions for preserving the history of one of Cumberland County’s most storied schools.
One team envisioned the building as a front porch for the community. Another pointed to its work designing a modern high school rooted in Black history. Presenters discussed mature trees, athletic fields, geothermal systems, alumni artifacts, and whether construction could proceed without displacing students. At one point, even the possibility of bringing softball onto the main campus—and perhaps adding a swimming pool—entered the conversation.
Ten firms submitted qualifications for the project. The board conducted a poll to determine which firms would be placed on the initial interview schedule.
After the interviews, board members ranked the four teams from first to fourth. The joint team of Andre Johnson Architects (AJA) and LPA Design Studios emerged as the board’s top-ranked choice. The ranking authorizes district administrators to begin negotiations on a contract, which the school board is scheduled to consider on November 17.
If the district and the top-ranked team cannot reach an agreement, the board could move to the next firm in its ranking order. In the board meeting, the district did not disclose how the other three firms ranked.
Turning Ideas Into Tangible Buildings
Andre Johnson, president and design principal of Raleigh-based Andre Johnson Architects, told board members his firm had partnered with California-based LPA Design Studios (LPA), a multidisciplinary design firm, and a team of engineers, designers, and educators that included a former principal, and a civil engineer. He said the partnership would combine the personal attention of a boutique practice with LPA’s decades of experience designing schools.
The team would not arrive with a building already imagined, he said.
“Our designs are never driven by what we want,” Johnson said. “It’s always about taking your ideas and your vision and making it tangible.”
Johnson said Andre Johnson Architects had worked with three North Carolina school districts and completed five K-12 projects in the state. Since 2020, he said, the firm’s K-12 portfolio had represented approximately $500 million in work.
The team highlighted two projects to demonstrate how it could approach E.E. Smith’s most significant challenges: fitting a replacement school onto an occupied campus and carrying a school’s history into a modern building. Events commemorating the 100th year of the school, now in its fourth location, kicked off in September.
Johnson pointed to the proposed replacement of Jordan High School in Durham. The planning process required designers to determine how a building more than twice the size of the existing school could fit on the same campus while students attended class.
“The challenge was very, very difficult, because how can you keep 1,500, 1,600 kids active on a site while building a brand-new building that’s more than twice the size?” Johnson said.
He said the team worked through the academic programming, design, and construction logistics required to complete such a project on an occupied campus.
Johnson also cited the firm’s work at Holt Elementary School in Durham, where students remained on campus during a phased renovation.
LPA’s work at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles offered a built example of how a school’s history could be carried into a modern campus.
The school opened in 1923 in Boyle Heights and later became one of the campuses associated with the 1968 East Los Angeles student walkouts against unequal educational conditions. An LPA representative said that history—and the generations of families connected to the school—became central to the modernization.
The work occurred while the school remained in operation and included new classrooms, a gymnasium, a wellness center, and performing arts and administrative spaces.
Murals throughout the campus help tell the school’s story, while a timeline allows students to learn what occurred on the grounds beneath them. Benches from the original campus were also incorporated into the new design.
The project also treated interior and exterior areas as learning spaces, incorporating gardens, covered porches, and places designed to support student wellness.
For E.E. Smith, the example illustrated how a replacement campus could provide modern learning spaces without discarding the artifacts, traditions, and stories that make the school feel like home to generations of alumni and families.
Johnson said that work would begin by listening to the people who know E.E. Smith best. Community engagement, he said, would not be an exercise completed simply to satisfy a requirement.
“It is not prescriptive—it’s not performative,” Johnson said. “It is something that’s embedded in who we are.”
Near the end of the presentation, Johnson displayed a quote the team said it found in an article about E.E. Smith: “It’s just a feeling. It’s hard to say. It’s family. This is home,” the quote read.
Johnson said those words captured the less tangible part of the assignment. The project’s site and construction challenges could be addressed through design, he said, but the team would also need to understand the community, earn its trust, and listen to the families who regard E.E. Smith as home.
“We feel this team brings those tangible and intangible things that you need to make this project successful,” Johnson said.
‘House-Porch-Garden Typology’
Members of the AJA team walked through the neighborhood surrounding E.E. Smith ahead of their interview with the board.
“One of the great honors of living nearby was being able to visit the site,” said Rosario Dominguez Tapia, a designer with AJA. “We got to see firsthand how deeply connected the school is to the neighborhood. These are not separated elements.”
During the visit, the team noticed what Dominguez Tapia described as a traditional Southern “house-porch-garden typology”—the relationship among a home, its porch, and the surrounding landscape.
“Everyone loves a porch, and it’s a transitional space that I think we can translate into the building,” she said.
Dominguez Tapia said a porch-inspired design could make the school feel welcoming while creating distance between the building and nearby homes.
“The porch gives an opportunity to bring in that welcoming aspect to the site, but at the same time provide the distance, the buffer,” she said.
Landscaping, revegetation, and covered canopies could strengthen that transition. The same house-porch-garden relationship, Dominguez Tapia said, could help the team design a large school that still feels appropriately scaled to its residential surroundings.
“How can we be careful about not building a giant building in the middle of this very quiet, peaceful neighborhood?” she asked. “We have to be respectful.”
The team also identified existing pieces of the campus that could help carry its history into the replacement school.
“There were memorial bricks. There was a fountain,” Dominguez Tapia said. “There were also natural elements. There are such beautiful magnolia trees, maple trees, oak trees that we think can be valuable to help preserve some of the legacy of the site.”
Fitting the Vision Onto 27 Acres
The existing 27-acre property presents one of the project’s greatest challenges. North Carolina’s school-facility guidelines recommend 30 developable acres plus one acre for every 100 students for a high school—and at least 10 additional acres when a stadium and spectator parking are planned. The guidelines allow smaller sites but note that they may require solutions such as multistory construction, shared facilities, limited play areas, or off-site parking.
Johnson pointed to a sports complex project in Wake Forest as an example of how his firm addressed a similarly constrained site. He said the development would ordinarily have required slightly more than 100 acres, but the team had about 60 acres available.
Designers used changes in the site’s elevation to tuck portions of the development into the land and placed soccer fields on a roof.
He said the project demonstrated how designers could turn a site limitation into part of the solution—an approach the team could bring to E.E. Smith’s 27-acre campus.
The team said the limited acreage could require a multistory building or athletic fields designed to serve more than one purpose. A baseball or softball field, for example, could potentially overlap with a practice field.
A member of the design team also suggested exploring whether a swimming pool could be built on county-owned property and shared by E.E. Smith and other district high schools.
Board member Deanna Jones said she graduated from a nine-story high school with a radio station on the top floor and a pool at the bottom.
“I know it’s feasible,” Jones said. “We don’t want E.E. Smith to be cheated out of anything.”
The team did not present a finished design. When board member Terra Jordan asked the presenters to describe their vision for E.E. Smith, Johnson said it could not be fully formed without input from students, employees, alumni, and residents.
“I think it’s fairly presumptuous to come in with a preconceived idea,” Johnson said.
Johnson said the broader goals would be to fit the district’s priorities onto the site, respect the surrounding neighborhood, and strengthen the school’s connection to its community.
Kate Mraw, LPA’s director of K-12, offered several possibilities the team could explore.
Instead of one large building, she said, the campus could include multiple buildings reflecting different periods of E.E. Smith’s history, from its 1927 opening and 1954 move to Seabrook Road through its centennial. Public-facing portions of the campus could also provide services for nearby residents.
Mraw asked board members to imagine a community clinic or spaces where students could help residents with needs connected to the school’s academic programs, such as creating a website for a new business.
“I think those are the types of moments that can start to shape the vision for what’s possible here,” Mraw said.
What The Other Firms Offered
The other three firms presented different approaches to E.E. Smith’s history, educational programs, and constrained campus.
Perkins Eastman, a global firm with offices in Raleigh and Charlotte, compared the project to its work at Dunbar Senior High School in Washington, D.C., where designers created a central gathering space and recognized 100 distinguished alumni while reserving room for future names. The team’s message was that a historic school should celebrate its past without suggesting that its story has ended.
The firm projected that the replacement E.E. Smith could open in August 2030, provided the district involved its construction manager and permitting agencies early and settled major expectations before schematic design.
The district’s current timeline calls for E.E. Smith students to relocate to Reid Ross for the 2027–28 school year. Design work is expected to conclude around December 2027, with construction beginning in early January 2028. Students are scheduled to move from Reid Ross into the new E.E. Smith building during the 2030–31 school year.
DLR Group, a global firm with studios in Charlotte and Durham, centered its presentation on the phrase “Listen, design, deliver.” The firm proposed taking public engagement beyond traditional meetings by visiting libraries, neighborhoods, and other locations accessible to residents who might otherwise be excluded from the process.
“It’s not our vision,” proposed community liaison Kwame Bailey said. “It’s your vision.”
The firm also cited its work on Gulf Shores High School in Alabama, where energy-conscious design decisions were projected to save approximately $6.4 million in operating costs over 20 years.
RATIO Design, a global design firm with a studio in Raleigh, emphasized the scale of its school-design experience, telling board members it had worked on 342 K-12 projects nationwide, including 22 high schools in North Carolina.
Its proposed four-stage process—discover, dream, develop, and deliver—would begin by asking students, employees, alumni, and residents what makes E.E. Smith distinct. The firm showed examples of gymnasium flooring, murals, and other familiar pieces preserved or repurposed in replacement schools.
The firm pointed to its work at Fuquay-Varina High School in southern Wake County, where designers addressed a constricted, multi-building campus by adding a four-story tower while preserving the school’s existing ball fields, drives and portions of the original building.
Professional Relationships Draw Questions
After the interviews, board members discussed the presentations before completing written forms ranking the four teams from first to fourth. The forms were then to be submitted to Matthew Johnson, the district’s executive director of operations, for tabulation. During that discussion, however, board member Mary Hales openly explained why she favored AJP and LPA.
“With number one, every single individual knew what they were talking about,” Hales said. “They had researched. They were knowledgeable of the school, knowledgeable of the area.”
Hales, who said she and her children have ties to the E.E. Smith community, argued that the team better understood the importance of involving residents in the project.
“I know these people,” Hales said. “I know basically what they want, and I know there will be pushback if we do not use that first one.”
“That number one group is the right fit to tackle this job,” she added.
After another member noted that the rankings were supposed to be recorded on paper rather than announced during the discussion, Hales said she was expressing her assessment, not attempting to campaign for the firm.
The conversation then shifted to Johnson and his professional familiarity with representatives of several competing firms.
The issue first surfaced during DLR Group’s interview, when board members asked the firm’s proposed project manager, Julie Leary, how she knew Johnson. Leary said they had known each other professionally for several years but had not completed a project together.
During the debrief, Hales said those connections could raise questions among members of the public.
“Too many of the other three clearly made it known that they know you and have had past experiences with you,” Hales told Johnson.
She also pointed to a photograph of Johnson included in RATIO Design’s materials.
“Was that a picture of you in that last one?” Hales asked. “People are going to have a very, very hard time with that.”
Jordan defended Johnson, saying his familiarity with architects and construction professionals was unsurprising given his years of work in the field. She recalled recently asking him about a school construction project in another county and learning that he knew officials involved there as well.
“He knows a lot of people,” Jordan said.
Jordan said the board should explain those professional relationships plainly rather than leave room for speculation.
Johnson said he knew professionals from all four teams through previous projects, industry conferences, and his work in K-12 construction. He emphasized that he neither ranked the firms nor decided which team would receive the first opportunity to negotiate.
“The community will know that who you select is who does it—not who Matt selects,” Johnson told the board.
