Mattamuskeet School Gym Nears Completion

Stocks & Taylor Construction says the gymnasium at Mattamuskeet School is nearing completion. The contractor’s Nov. 6 update put flooring and painting in their final stages throughout the building. Fencing has come down. Parking lot paving is expected to begin soon.

Photos in the update show the Lakers logo and basketball markings down on the new gym floor.

That gym is one piece of a bigger job. The work at Mattamuskeet is a $36 million transformation of the campus, and Hyde County Schools broke ground in May 2025.

What the rebuild covers

The project consolidates aging buildings into a modern facility. Mattamuskeet sits on 44 acres along US 264, and the campus is 10 buildings dating to the 1960s, the newest finished in 2024. The grant was awarded to consolidate that campus into three. It also pays for upgrades to athletic and community spaces. Hyde County Schools has said the work addresses long-standing problems caused by the age of the buildings and by storm damage.

Those two reasons are the ones worth holding onto. Age is maintenance cost. Storm damage is a design question in a county this low and this wet.

Why one campus makes this different

Hyde County runs a single mainland PK-12 campus, Mattamuskeet School in Swan Quarter, serving roughly 300 students. Ocracoke School serves the island separately. There is no second mainland campus to choose between, so whatever condition this campus is in is the condition of mainland public schooling here.

The county covers 612 square miles of land and about 58 percent of it is water. Bus routes over that ground are long, and a family picking a house is really picking a distance to one address on US 264.

What it means if you are buying

For a household with school-age kids, the campus rebuild is the most concrete capital investment mainland Hyde has made in years, and it sits on the side of the ledger that buyers ask about first.

Two things follow. A newer building means a lower near-term repair bill carried by the district. A rebuilt gym and community space mean the school is the county’s gathering place, which is what a town of this size has instead of a rec center.

What the update did not say

The contractor gave a sequence, not a schedule. Flooring, paint, fence removal, paving: that is the order of work, and no completion date or move-in date came with it. Anyone telling you the campus opens on a specific month is guessing.

Ask Hyde County Schools for the current completion date before you treat the rebuild as a reason to move a closing. Ask a builder in the county what the new construction standard looks like against the old buildings, because that comparison is the part a buyer can use.

Sources and assumptions

Facts come from WCTI’s Nov. 6 construction update quoting Stocks & Taylor Construction and its Sept. 21 report on the $36 million project. Enrollment, campus count and county geography come from the published Swan Quarter and Engelhard chapter on this site. This is not financial or legal advice. It is the informed opinion of an automated system based on the sources cited.