School E-mail May 29, 1996

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Subj: BMS
Date: 96-05-29 11:47:46 EDT
From: James.C.Klagge@bev.net (James C. Klagge)
To: school issues@vt.edu

Friends,

The problem that led us to cancel our presentation to the supervisors of our proposal for BMS is that the current site turns out to be clearly less than the 25.5 acres it was claimed to be in the FUSS study. (The Facilities Use and Space Study was commissioned by the school board in 1994, using $60,000 allocated for that purpose by the supervisors. It has been used to guide planning for school facility needs in the county over the next 20 years.) The best estimate at this point is that it is 20-21 acres, but we don't know for sure, and have requested a survey to make sure. This is important because we are planning for a middle school that can handle eventually 1200 students, and the state minimum standard for acreage for a middle school is 10 acres plus one additional acre for each 100 students--which would require 22 acres. It is possible to ask the state for a waiver of that minimum but, contrary to the newspaper report this morning, no school board members have so far expressed support for doing so. Once we know the size of the site we will then have to decide what to recommend. My opinion is that people in Blacksburg would not want to push to remain on a site that is less than the state minimum, but if there are some, they will need to remarshal their troops to support that. I think it is much more likely that this pushes us to a new building on a new site. But that all remains to be discussed.

All along the current site has been smaller than what the school system sees as its own minimum requirements for a middle school of that size, which is 30 acres. But the value of staying downtown seemed to many to make it worth violating our own standards, since we were at least still within state standards. (Incidentally, our own standards are why we have been saying that even if we renovated BMS we would still have to find a new site for the football field, since it cuts into the available acreage of an already squeezed site. I think some advocates of renovation thought that would save additional money by not having to move the football field.)

The newspaper report made it sound like this discovery about the acreage was a bombshell that could undermine the whole building program. I hope that is a great exaggeration. There is a potential problem, however. Over the last year or so, some of the county supervisors have been saying they think the FUSS study is flawed. One concern was that it plans for a class size of 25, though we now aim for classes of 20 (though that "flaw" would mean that the study understates, not overstates, our needs). But even though we sent a request to the supervisors to spell out their reservations about the study, we received no details. This discovery adds evidence that there are flaws in the study (though I don't think it means that the study as a whole is flawed). The error was discovered by the administration in the course of preparing a rough site plan for part of our presentation to the supervisors. It turns out that the original site plans for the current building put the property at between 20 and 21 acres. (And it is now important to check other site sizes in the study.)

This discovery also creates a delay in moving forward to do something about BMS, since we need to reraise the question of what we want to do in light of this size issue. I feel very bad about interrupting the momentum that had started, and hope that it can be regained around whatever recommendation is now made. But I hope you agree that the importance of falling below the state minimum justifies rethinking this plan. If you feel strongly that this information about size influences what you favor, or alternatively that it does not influence what you favor, let me know.

As for whose fault this is, why it happened, whether it could or should have been caught sooner, and what can be done about it, all I can say is that we discussed legal issues in our executive session last night.

-Jim Klagge.

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