School E-mail November 21, 1996

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Subj: No Subject
Date: 96-11-21 11:27:24 EST
From: James.C.Klagge@bev.net (James C. Klagge)
To: school issues list@vt.edu

Dear Friends,

As you may have read in today's paper, the School board voted Tuesday, 5-4, to support renovation of BMS. I was one of the 5. Though I had never voted in favor of renovation prior to that, I saw it as the best option at that point. What follows is most of a letter I wrote responding to a constituent who was quite unhappy with my vote--because renovation would risk educational and health harms, and because it contradicted the recommendation of the FUSS committee:

I'm certainly concerned about the educational impact renovation could have, and it was part of the resolution I supported that these be minimized. No doubt they can't be eliminated. I agree that we are opening ourselves up to "I told you so" if things don't go perfectly. (Since my son Nick will be at BMS for another 2&1/2 years, I'm not asking others to bear burdens that I am unwilling to bear, and he'll certainly get none of the benefits.)

HOWEVER, all of our other options lead to a worse possibility--namely getting nothing done to the middle school and living with increasing overcrowding. If your position is that it is better to do nothing than to renovate, I would say not many people would support you. (When I warned in a recent mailing that we were going to be faced with this choice and sought advice, the response was 10-1 in favor of accepting renovation over getting nothing.) At our last board meeting on Nov. 5th I refused to support renovation because I wanted to allow Blacksburg people one more chance to go before the supervisors and get them to change their minds. I understand some people did show up, with petitions. But it was obviously not the kind of upswell that would make a difference (the way there had been in Riner over the 40 acres). So now I felt like the time for discussing was over. If we had voted again for a new school on the same site, or a new school on a new site, we already knew the supervisors would not fund that. We could have dug in our heels and said if you don't do it our way, then we won't approve going forward with any of the school building programs. Frankly I don't know what the effects of that would have been. I do know it would have risked serious alienation from other attendance areas, and from the supervisors. If I thought the supervisors were requiring us to do something seriously wrong or detrimental to the well being of students I would have dug in my heels. But it's not like that. Renovations happen all the time--often with students on site. It's not ideal, but it can work. Furthermore, a number of people in Blacksburg, including parents, support it. That was the only real option we had, other than doing nothing--so I chose to take it. What would you have done? We can complain all we want about the supervisors, but that won't get ANY schools built, and it would probably hurt our budget in the future. ... I said at the meeting last night that this is the hardest issue I've had in my year on the board. I tried to form a consensus about what to do on this, but it was just too divisive. I'm really sorry I wasn't able to do better than this, but I think this is better than the option that was left. As for the Blacksburg FUSS committee's recommendation, we supported it as long as we could. When FUSS originally supported new school/new site we did too; when it compromised with new school/same site I fought hard to get that supported and we did; then we returned to new school/same site when the size issue arose. I think we have done the best we could to get the FUSS recommendation accepted. We failed at that--so we were left with sticking with it anyway and getting nothing, or dealing with the political realities that the FUSS committee hadn't been asked to confront. Although you can paint this as simply 2 Tech prof's sticking their noses in local issues, you know that the BoS is the last group to be swayed by something simply because any Tech prof's might be behind it. The reality is that there was a lot of community support behind what the Tech prof's wanted--and they effectively got their viewpoint heard. If there is a lesson to be gotten, it may be that parents and others who opposed renovation didn't see their job as extending beyond influencing the school board. Once we accepted your view you considered that to be it. But you know the school board has rather little influence on the BoS, and the BoS gets to make the final decision--so it ain't over 'til it's over.

Another part of our resolution was that the football field be moved. I don't think even that is a foregone conclusion with the supervisors. In fact there is still no guarantee that the BoS will fund even renovation. So there is still important lobbying work to be done. ...

I'm sorry we couldn't do better than renovation, and I'm sorry we couldn't get more of a consensus in Blacksburg. This has been really frustrating for me, partly because I could see this coming from a long way off. But I hope we can solve the overcrowding at BMS, end up with a nice school, and focus on how to enhance the educational experience at BMS along the way.

Jim.

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