During a meeting Tuesday evening , school board members discussed several possibilities for the proposed project.

More than 150 people packed into the Winston-Salem Forsyth County Board of Education meeting Tuesday evening to hear an update on the proposed 3,000 seat football stadium at Reynolds High School near Hanes Park.

Neal Fine lives about a block away from the proposed project. He wore a green and white pin that said “Save Hanes Park”.

“I think when you decide if you have noise or quiet, quiet should win every time and I’m just not interested in the noise, the trash, the pollution, the light pollution that would come with a stadium,” said Fines.

Currently, Reynolds High School Shares its football field with Parkland High school. Both schools play at the Deaton-Thompson Stadium on Clemmonsville Road.  

Brad Fisher is the Athletic Director at Reynolds. He says his students drive more than 13,500 miles per year, just to attend practice for various sports.

“We lease seven different fields for our kids to practice because there because there is nowhere for them at Hanes Park,” said Fisher.

Anna-Dixon Harkey, 14,  plays Field Hockey at Reynolds High School. She says transportation to and from practice can be challenging for many of her classmates.

“We have to go to play at the Children’s Home for practice and then we have to go to Bolton Field for our games so it is difficult to schedule it around other community events on the field and at the Children’s home,” says Harkey.

Chance Myers, 15,  is a football player at Reynolds High School. He says having a stadium closer to home would be a good investment for students and the community.

“It gives us a place to do pep rallies and support of the teams and it will give us an advantage on home games and stuff,” says Myers.

Fisher says he also worries that the distance may discourage students who can’t always get rides to practice from playing sports at Reynolds. 

Ellen Knott lives near Hanes Park. Two of her children graduated from Reynolds High School. She doesn’t want the new football stadium in her neighborhood.

“It’s  a green space in a place that is very short on green space and the predicted population in Winston-Salem calls for more green space and this reduces that,” says Knott.

A group of community members called the Reynolds Home Advantage have been pushing for a 4,500 seat stadium on school property near Hanes Park.

During Tuesday’s meeting, Assistant Superintendent for Operations, Daryl Walker used a power point presentation to explain several different scenarios with school board members.

But in the end it came down to about three options. Two of them include building a smaller football stadium on the school’s property, which would seat around 2,200 people. The third option is to not build a new stadium at all and continue playing at Deaton-Thompson.

The plans also take into consideration a proposed change to the city and Forsyth County zoning regulations.

Under the amendment, backers of stadium projects that have more than 1,500 seats and do not provide adequate parking spaces on campus would have to demonstrate to city council at a public hearing that they can provide adequate parking on surrounding streets in order to get a special use permit.

“The only concern with the text amendment is the size. Obviously, those who are advocating for the stadium would love to see a larger stadium and the text amendment would limit the ability to have a large one but as you may have heard the size of the stadium can be done even within the context of that text amendment on that site,” said Winston-Salem Forsyth County School Board Chairman Donny Lambeth.

The stadium would be paid for by private funds. Lambeth says the cost of the stadium project is estimated anywhere from $5 to $9 million, depending on the size.

“We will decide first do we need a stadium at the Reynolds site, then the location, and then once we say we need a stadium at the Reynolds location, you give the proponents an opportunity to raise the money and that is a long process. It will not happen really quick in my opinion,” said Lambeth.

Lambeth says school board members will decide the fate of the proposed football stadium for Reynolds High School on November 27.