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44 Page 7 GOAL 11. PLANNING Integrate historic preservation into all levels of public planning to ensure the development and implementation of preservation-compatible public policies and activities. "VISIT TO JOHNSTON COUNTY SCHOOL LESSON IN CHALLENGES TO PRESERVATION EFFORTS I A visit to the Cleveland Middle School in Johnston County along with personnel from the Department of Public Instruction ' s (DPI) School Planning Division provided members of the HPO ' s restoration and environmental review staff with a real4ife lesson in the challenges facing school boards and preservationists as they try to deal with the question of what to do about older schools . What staff members found in January 1998 was a handsome pre-World War II school complex in need of a cleanup , renovations , and additions , if it is to provide good service to the students and faculty . But rather than the cleanup , repairs , and additions , the school is to be abandoned with no real plans for its future after the students move to a new facility a few miles down the road. Unfortunately , Cleveland Middle School is not an isolated case but rather a fairly typical example of what is happening to older schools throughout the state . North Carolina has about two thousand public schools in 116 school systems , and almost half of them have been rated as not worth renovating and candidates for replacement . Using funds from the $ 1 . 8 billion statewide bond issue passed in 1997 , local school systems have proposed nearly nine hundred projects , with 80 percent of the money going to renovations and additions , mostly at younger schools . A few outstanding examples of older schools being renovated are high schools in Raleigh, Asheville , Winston-Salem, and Roanoke Rapids . High schools ) because the classes are mostly lecture-based and require less space , are easier to adapt to the new space standards for classrooms . But even high schools are finding that they need more classroom and laboratory space for computers and new technologies . While money is available for rehabilitation, the overriding factor in the move to replace older schools is space . The average pre-World War II classroom is 600 to 700 square feet . Today' s standards call for classrooms of 1 , 000 to 1 , 200 square feet clustered in groups of four to allow for team teaching and "project groups . " Media rooms , formerly libraries and the heart of the school , require 1 , 200 square feet . If the changes in classroom spaces and their organization are not enough to sink efforts to keep older schools in service, space requirements for playgrounds , parking lots , and safe traffic patterns for school bus loading and parent drop -offs are likely to seal the fate of an older school . Moreover , once there is a proposal to abandon a school , maintenance and repairs are cut to the minimum , which means that small problems are uncorrected and grow. into larger, more costly problems that are cited to further justify abandonment and, in some cases , demolition of reusable public buildings in the heart of established neighborhoods .