School Board E-mail October 6, 1997

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Subj: Back in Business
Date: 97-10-06 18:54:50 EDT
From: James.C.Klagge@bev.net (James C. Klagg)
To: "School Issues"@vt.edu

Dear Friends,

Enough people have finally asked if I was still doing my newsletters that I thought it must be time to get back in business.

I. Introduction (for those new to this list; others may skip to Section II): For almost two years, since I have been on the Montgomery County school board, I have been sharing my perspective on school issues in a sort of newsletter format with many people by e-mail. There are now over 400 addresses on my mailing list, and it has gotten mention in 2 national publications. It is NOT a list-serve, or a discussion group. You will not receive other people's comments on my mailings. But you may respond directly to me with questions or comments, and I will respond as appropriate. If you do not want to be on this list, please let me know and I'll be happy to delete you. I generally send out mailings about once a month, depending on what's happening. BEV did a study of my recipients last year, and there was an overwhelmingly positive response. If you know others who would like to be on this list, send me their e-mail addresses and I'm happy to add them. The list has grown by about 100 addresses since it began!

II. Personnel Changes.

Fred Morton, our new superintendent, is getting settled in finally. Everything that I have heard has been extremely positive. I hope you get an opportunity to meet him at some point.

This summer we lost John Martin, assistant superintendent, to a superintendent's job in Missouri; and last month we lost Larry Schoff, director of buildings, maintenance and transportation, to a consulting job in Blacksburg. These are both big losses. As the administration refills them, they will also be considering the possibility of some administrative reorganization. The school board is also in the process of appointing a new clerk.

III. Building Program.

As you probably know, we have a new elementary school under construction in the Riner area. That is going ahead on schedule. We are in the beginning stages of building a new HS in the Shawsville/Elliston area. And we have recommended a new Middle school in Christiansburg; and accepted the idea of a renovated and expanded MS in Blacksburg. This spring the board of supervisors hired an engineering consulting firm, Marsh-Witt, to assess our plans for these last 3 projects so that they could have an independent point of view. They called this value-engineering. Marsh-Witt gave its reports this summer, and the school administration and board have been processing them to give the supervisors our feedback. On the Shawsville HS we mainly stuck with what we had approved. The report on Christiansburg was quite radical--proposing that the MS be moved to a renovated and expanded building where C'burg Elementary now is, and the elementary and primary schools be moved to the MS building once it is renovated. This has gotten a very mixed reception from the community, and as far as we could tell was not carefully thought through. For instance, State requirements for classroom size are larger for K-5 than they are for 6-8, so many of the classrooms in the current MS would have to be reconfigured. This would be very expensive (knocking down all the walls) and would reduce the enrollment capacity of the building, requiring significant further additions. Finally the resulting elementary school would be much larger than we like our elementary schools to be. These factors were not considered by Marsh-Witt. Their report seems more to have been an attempt to do some brain-storming, than an actual careful proposal. In any case the school board voted to stick with our original plan to build on a new site, once one can be secured.

The biggest issue concerns Blacksburg Middle School, as you might have guessed. Marsh-Witt suggested that we consider having two middle schools in Blacksburg. This is an idea that has been discussed in the past, but not gotten very much support: The problems include the costs of staffing and administering 2 buildings, with supporting libraries, etc.; and the dangers of resentment over who goes to which school. The stong points include the educational value of smaller middle schools. A single MS was planned to be for 1000, with capacity to expand to 1200. 2 MS's could be 500/600 apiece. Some people feel having more than 1000 at one MS is just too large. At about the same time we also received some preliminary reports from Glen Earthman, whom we had commissioned in the Spring to update his demographic projections for student enrollment in the county over the next 15 years or so. The original intention was to have a solid basis for our requests for new buildings based on expected enrollment increases. However, we got more than we bargained for. Earthman is projecting much larger enrollment growth in the Blacksburg area than we had been anticipating, based on his last projections. There is a good deal of uncertainty in these sorts of projections; but of the three demographic sources we have consulted in past years, Earthman's have been the most accurate. Here are his projections for the Blacksburg area:

B-burg Present Projected in 2006 Projected in 2010

schools enrollment (low----------high) (low----------high)

BHS 1048 1170 to 1321 1231 to 1511

BMS 881 995 to 1070 1085 to 1386

Elem's 1869 1779 to 2115 1890 to 2331

(If the formatting for this table gets screwed up so that you can't understand it, and you want the information, let me know and I will send it in a clearer manner.)

As you can see, our current plans for BMS already seem obsolete, if we can rely on these projections. So we have to make a judgement about that, and also work with the supervisors to insure that we can come to some common understanding about what magnitude of growth the county (especially Blacksburg) needs to be planning for. In any case, this information suggests that we should ONCE AGAIN (!) revisit the question of whether we have the best plan for BMS. As before, there are various options for the board to consider:

-Build a new HS first, to accommodate the growth at that level (which exceeds the capacity of the current HS); and then renovate both the current HS and the current MS to be middle schools, so that we would have 2 (each with, say, 600 capacity, expandable to 700 or 800).

-Build a new HS first, renovated the current HS to be a single MS (though that would still be huge), and save the current MS to be an elementary school in the future.

-Build a new MS and renovate the current one, so that we have 2 MS's; and then deal with the HS issue later.

-Stick with the current renovate/expand plan for the MS, but expand it to accommodate the expected growth; and then deal with the HS issue later.

-Other ideas yet to be formulated.

This issue has been sent to the Blacksburg FUSS committee for feedback, and we will be considering it further at our meetings this month.

Your ideas or opinions are welcome as well.

Why didn't we know to be planning for this magnitude of growth all along? I think the answer is that we were using the best studies we had available at the time; plus Blacksburg's growth (and prospects for further growth) simply has become greater quite recently. Among the new factors would have to be: 3A and the smart highway, the phenomenal growth of the Corporate Research Center, possible Price's Mountain development, etc.

As you know if you have been involved in the BMS discussions all along, there's not much that could be more upsetting than the prospect of revisiting all of those issues--especially in light of the fact that people seemed to be mostly on-board for accepting and making the best of the plan for renovation/expansion. As usual, a crucial decision lies with the supervisors, since they are still on record as stipulating that the current site is adequate for the projected BMS enrollment. It was because of that stipulation that the school board accepted the idea of renovation/expansion. But the supervisors are asking us for our response to the Marsh-Witt report, which will have to be considered in light of Earthman's updates, so we will be revisiting these issues, whether we want to or not.

III. Elections.

Come January there will be a very different school board. Two members will go off the board because their districts have been deemed by the state to constitute double representation of their constituents (David Moore, representing the Town of C-burg, and Roy Vickers, representing the Town of B-burg). Three other members are not running for reelection (Mary Beth Dunkenberger, in District C, for family reasons; Annette Perkins, in A, who is running for supervisor; and Barry Worth, in D, who is running for supervisor). To replace them there are uncontested elections in C (David McCrumb) and D (Mary North), and a contested election in A (between Arnold Saari and Tina McPherson). There will be a public forum for the school board candidates on Thursday, Oct. 9th at 7:30pm on the 3rd floor of the Montgomery County courthouse in downtown Christiansburg. There will also be a forum for the board of supervisor races at the same location on Thursday, Oct. 16th at 7pm. In district A the candidates are Annette Perkins (D) and Frank Baker (R); in district C they are Joe Stewart (R) and Jim Smith (D); in district D they are Todd Kind (I), Barry Worth (I), Jim Martin (D), and Jim Politis (R). These elections are important to the future of the county, and if you live in those districts I hope you will avail yourselves of these opportunities in making an informed vote. If you do not know which district you live in, you can find out by calling the voter registrar at 382-5741. It is, however, too late to register to vote for the election if you are not yet registered.

One implication of the large change in the school board will be that no one on the new board will have more than 2 years experience. So providing leadership will be a challenge we will have to step forward to accept. Wish us luck!

IV. Focus 2006 Goals:

The board needs to submit to the state an up-dated 6-year plan soon. This has been generated by the goals set out in the Focus 2006 report adopted a few years ago. For the most part this is straightforward, but one interesting issue has arisen. We have a county-wide goal of insuring that ultimately no core class has more than 20 students in it. To reach this goal by 2006 the 6-year plan requires that we add 18-19 classroom teachers each year (in addition to those necessary for keeping up with growing enrollment). Because of budget constraints we have not been able to keep up with this goal, adding only about a dozen classroom teachers each year over the last few years. In fact, sticking to the 6-year plan would have been possible, but only at the cost of virtually everything else, such as salary increases, etc. The advisory committee overseeing the implemetation of the 2006 goals has recommended that we keep the goal of 20 per class, but increase the time-line by which we meet it to 2019-20, so that the additions of teachers required by the 6-year plan is more in line with what is realistic given the kinds of budget requests generated, and doesn't overshadow other legitimate concerns.

I favor this modification, since it will allow us to formulate more realistic requests at budget time, and allows the 6-year plan to be a more realistic planning document, rather than an ideal that doesn't offer much immediate guidance. Others on the board want to keep the shorter timeline, arguing that the 6-year plan, and the resulting budget requests, should reflect our judgements of need, regardless of realism and politics. (I think the term "need" has become more a rhetorical tool than a useful descriptive term.) This raises, once again, my favorite issue of the philosophy and politics of budget requests. I'd be interested in your comments on this.

You might be interested in what progress we have been making on class size: In the 3 years that we have had the current 6-year plan we have managed to add 35.5 classroom teachers (out of the 57 that were called for by the plan). These additions have lowered average class size by about 6/10ths of a pupil system wide. The emphasis has so far been at the elementary level (where the state has been giving special assistance at the K-3 level). Beginning this year we have started to put more emphasis at the secondary level, where some class sizes have exceeded 30. (We try to have an absolute cap of 25/class at the elementary level, and 30/class at the secondary.)

V. Miscellaneous.

There are many other issues that we can or will deal with. An ongoing issue is academic challenge and assessment. (Perhaps this is more upsetting than the BMS issue!) We had hoped to make this the focus of our board retreat in September--but that was cancelled because of too many conflicts, and will probably not be rescheduled until the new members come on board in January. If the inability of the board to deal with this frustrates you, I can only express my sympathy and hope that we will be able to do better. I am also dismayed at the difficulty of confronting this--but I feel it is not so much a lack of will as it is difficulty in finding ways to get a handle on a very large and amorphous issue. But I am committed to staying with it. Part of the problem is also the ways we are in transition (first a new superintendent, and next a changed board), but I hope we can settle down in January.

Hope you are enjoying the fall colors as much as I am.

Sincerely,

Jim Klagge
School Board Member
District F.

email: admin@gisone.com