The Facilities Planning Task Force should complete a five-year construction plan by March, said Dr. Ed Tyson, Kannapolis schools superintendent.

Growth in the 4,100-student system has pushed the population at Kannapolis Middle School to more than 1,000, said Tyson, who sits on the task force.

“Our middle school has just about failed,”he said. “We really don’t want it to get any bigger.”

The Kannapolis system added 250 students this year, a considerable amount for a system its size, Tyson said.

And that’s unusual for a city school system, where typically as residents age, numbers in the schools dwindle, he said.

But as growth heads north from Charlotte, more builders buy land in Kannapolis, and more young families discover mill houses can be economical starter homes, he said.

Tyson said the school system expects the most growth in the Concord Lake area, where developers have bought fairly large tracts of land. The city is also seeing a lot of “in-fill”development using vacant lots.

“We don’t see anything stagnant about the school system or the city of Kannapolis,”Tyson said. “We’ve picked up considerable growth, which is good, but it does present some problems.”

And the growth doesn’t stop at the county line. About a quarter of Kannapolis is in Rowan County, so the system gets construction money from Rowan and Cabarrus.

Ken Deal, Rowan County director of administration, represents Rowan on the task force, which is looking at Kannapolis as a whole.

The task force will get growth-projection data from Cabarrus and Rowan planning departments at a Feb. 4 meeting, he said.

“From what we’ve learned thus far, though, it appears there’s going to have to be something” in Rowan County, Tyson said.

Whether that will take the form of new schools or expansion at existing ones will depend on the data, he said.

The task force includes Kannapolis school board member Danita Rickard and representatives from Cabarrus, Kannapolis and Cabarrus County Schools.

They are working on the school system’s second five-year plan, Tyson said. The first included construction of the new Forest Brook Elementary School.

It included other projects now completed, such as a new science wing, cafeteria expansion and air conditioning in the main building at A.L. Brown High School.