School Issues Newsletter #60, September 13, 1999

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Subj: School Issues Newsletter #60
Date: 9/13/99 2:52:19 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: jklagge@bev.net (Jim Klagge)

Dear Friends,

Now that public schools are well under way, it's time to starting thinking about school issues again. For any who are new to this newsletter, I send out issues about once a month--not on a schedule, but according to whether there are issues that I think need explaining. I am the District F representative to the School Board in Montgomery County, and I am currently chair. However, this newsletter only expresses my personal view of issues. It is not representative of the SB officially. If you do not want to be on this mailing list, let me know and I'll take you off. I should emphasize that this is just a mailing list, not a discussion list-serve. You will NOT get mailings from everyone who responds to me, and also if you respond to me by e-mail, it will not go to everyone else on the list. At last count the mailing list was over 800. I've been doing this since February, 1996.

I have pledged not to use this list for "partisan" political purposes. I will only mention, and not repeat, that there are elections in November 2 for various postions on SB and the County Board of Supervisors, as well as other county and state offices. I urge you to become informed about races in your district. As it happens, no one is opposing me for reelection in District F. I had originally hoped to go door-to-door anyway, just for the contact and exposure that involves. But the press of life has had the consequence that I am not going door-to-door. In a way I wish I had an opponent just for the incentive that would give me. However, if you have concerns about issues relating to public education in Montgomery County, please do not hesitate to contact me, as I am more than happy to discuss them with you.

1) Foreign Language at the Elementary Level: Some of you know my children and I were in Europe for a month this summer. One of the things I reflected on, flying home, was how well Europeans do at speaking other languages, and how poorly Americans do. Being on the school board makes it possible for me to try to do something about this. I don't want to sound like a "leader" on this, since over the last few years several people have tried to raise these issues with me, but the experience of being in Europe made this a more viseral issue for me. Everyone knows that children learn languages best when they are young, but we don't try to teach them foreign languages until they are teens! Shouldn't we be teaching foreign languages in elementary school (I am sometimes asked)? I think we should. There are several problems, however. Let me go through them: -Since the state has instituted tests of SoL curriculum at grades 3 and 5, and since foreign language is not on that curriculum, we'd be hurting ourselves by increasing what is taught in this way with no recognized reward. I think it is unfortunate that foreign language is not part of elementary SoL's. And we do have trouble as it is getting good scores on the tests. But...if it is handled right, I think foreign language could be a good addition to elementary classrooms, rather than just one more thing you've gotta cover. As a school board we have talked about the need for a balanced curriculum, rather than allowing ourselves to be driven merely by what the state mandates. I think this is a place where we can embody that concern for balance.

-Where will we find, or how will we pay for, elementary teachers who can teach this stuff? My idea is that we buy material on videotape, or interactive cd-rom, so that it does not require additional training for, or new hiring of, teachers. Indeed, I think it is good for students to see that teachers are learners too, so I don't think it would be a problem that the teacher was not already trained. I am familiar with the BBC "Muzzy" videotapes for children ages 1-12 (which my kids used for German several years ago). I think this is very good, but I assume there are lots of different kinds of material out there, and someone would need to look into what was available and what was best. Perhaps you know about something.

-Won't this just take valuable time of teachers and students away from other things? Yes, but perhaps that is ok, in two ways: I think that the video/cd-rom approach can be fun and different in a way that would make it a sort of diversion from the "work" of the class. Perhaps it could be used as transition material--to watch videos as "down" time, or work on cd-roms while waiting for others to finish their work, etc. And, although it may take time away from other valuable things, we always are making choices between good things, and perhaps we have been too long in recognizing how good it would be to have this at the elementary level.

-How would we pay for this? To start with, I think we would want to run it as a pilot in one or a few classes in each elementary school. This would allow us to phase in the purchases, and allow teachers who are already interested to get involved, without having to get all teachers involved immediately. Even when it is fully implemented, presumably there could be a lot of sharing of tapes between classrooms. This would require some coordination, but does not seem unduly complicated. Also, it would mean using money that might have gone somewhere else. That's true, so we'd just have to bite that bullet. But it might be possible to get grant money, or make a special plea to the taxpayers for this kind of thing.

-Which language/s would be taught? Perhaps it would be up to the teacher. The Muzzy series has French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. I'm sure people might be disappointed that their kid didn't get the language they were hoping for...But the real value, from an educational perspective, is getting ANY kind of foreign language instruction in early. The more you have of that, the easier it becomes to later learn ANY foreign language. So I hope we wouldn't run aground over whether our kids got the right language. Presumably, over a few years, kids might be exposed to various languages, depending on their teachers. That might be a good thing. Or perhaps a school would decide that all their classes would do a certain language. Obviously there are many details to work out. Regardless of which language is taught, I think it could be a fun source of camaraderie for classmates.

I have raised this issue at a SB meeting in August, so the administration knows I am interested in exploring this. If this is something you also think we should explore, please let us know--by e-mail, or, more effectively, by speaking during public address at one of our meetings. (We always have time for that at the beginning of the open portion (7:30pm) of each of our meetings: generally the first and third Tuesday of each month--though call the clerk--382-5138/382-5100--or check our website www.mcps.org to verify date and time. Alternatively, if you think this is not a good idea, I'd also like to hear your views. I'm just at the exploratory stage with this--there's no railroad, or bandwagon. 2) Population Projections: If you've been reading the paper you know that we have recently had new enrollment projections done for us. And we have also gotten actual enrollment figures for each of our schools for Sept. 7th. All of this information has painted a confusing picture for us, and perhaps for you as well.

We had enrollment projections done for us by Glen Earthman in 1994 and 1997. The ones in 1997 predicted fairly substantial growth in the Blacksburg area over the next 10 to 15 years--sizeable enough that we were led to rethink our plans for Blacksburg Middle School. In particular it led us to think that really we needed to plan eventually for 2 MS's in Blacksburg, rather than just one. And it led some members of the BoS to think that we should look at trying to solve an incipient over-population problem at the HS as well. This projection and consequent rethinking led to the current plan of building a new HS and then renovating the current HS and the current MS as two MS's. But enrollments in Blacksburg last year did not increase at the level that had been predicted, in fact they decreased slightly. This variation, plus the feeling that we should get enrollment projections every 2 years, to keep on top of things, led us to commission a new projection this summer.

The work was done by DeJong & Assoc. this time. Their report, which contained lower projections than Earthman's, was received in August. Yet actual enrollment figures, from the opening of this school year, fell below their projections for Blackburg as well. DeJong had offered projections for high, medium, and low growth scenarios, but had predicted that the county would probably fall near the high level. The actual enrollments for this year immediately fell quite near the low-growth scenario. Mr. DeJong came to our September 7th board meeting to answer questions and try to explain some of the problems. This was very interesting and helpful. The puzzlement comes from the fact that the factors involved in a low growth scenario--high inflation, for example--aren't at work in the county. Their study had tried to get a more specific handle on the issue by looking at birth-rates in the county, but recently they went back and got even more specific data for birth-rates in the town of Blacksburg over the last several years. (This is slightly different from the Blacksburg "attendance zone", but it is the best they could do.) They found that the number of births to Blacksburg residents was: 267 (1991), 253 (1992), 215 (1993), 205 (1994), 257 (1995), 208 (1996), 223 (1997). Since a newborn takes about 5 years to get into kindergarten, you can see why there was the drop in enrollment in 1998, and a continued low this year. DeJong said that there is a tendency, with projections like this, to see a deviation of one year as an anomaly, and two years as a trend. But it would be a mistake to see the drops the last two years as a trend, since next year there will be a jump again..., a drop the next year..., and so on. What this shows is how unscientific these things can be. We have also tried to examine figures for numbers of home schoolers, and numbers of students who go to private schools, both in and out of the county. There is a possibility that these alternatives account for lower enrollments as well, due to some combination of: concern about inadequate facilities, inadequate instruction, fears about safety, desire for religious content, etc. Though these have grown, they are not sizeable factors for us.

When people look around Blacksburg, and Montgomery County generally, they can't help thinking there is and will be a lot of growth here. Why isn't this always translating into growing enrollments? Partly because growth does not always bring new families with lots of children with it. Often it brings families with no children, or few children. And new large houses may be occupied not by families needing more space, but just by people who can afford larger houses. Also new construction can just mean families moving from one house to another, rather than additional families coming to town. In general, as we reach the demographic end of the echo of the baby boom, growth will not work in ways that we thought it would. What, if anything, does this mean for the building program in the Blacksburg strand? Maybe nothing, though that remains to be seen. The SB has tried to steer a path over the last few years that avoids being too stubborn and also avoids being too fickle. We want to be responsive to the best projections that are available so that we can plan the most useful facilities for the future. Thus we have tried to be flexible in modifying what we want. ("Flexible" is the positive version of "fickle".) But when projections are unstable, as they have been, this has the danger of becoming fickle. We also want to stick to one plan long enough to be able to get something accomplished. There are various factors that have conspired to make it difficult to follow through on a plan. But our steadiness has partly wavered because of our desire to be sensitive to the probable future parameters. ("Steadiness" is the positive version of "stubborn".) I confess that steering that path has been difficult for me, and the consequent inaction has been the biggest disappointment of my first term in office.

Now, should we try to be sensitive to this new variation? When I raised this question at our last SB meeting, the general response was no. It's time to be steady for a change. One board member made the following point, however: While the need to do something about BMS is based on the inadequacy of current facilities, both in size and quality, the perceived need to do something about BHS was only on a projection of future inadequacy in size. If the future projection is significantly off, the justification for building a new HS disappears, and we are left once more with the need to address BMS. Maybe we should go back to the plan of building a new BMS on Price's Fork, and just forget about the HS. No motion was made to that effect, so we are still on course to build a new HS. We can still play with the numbers as to how large that HS should be. And then we still have the question of one vs. two MS's. If MS projections for Blacksburg really don't exceed 1000 in the next 10 years, do we really need/want 2 MS's?

It is possible to look at all of this and say--Let's just plan for the future and assume there will be sufficient growth. After all, our experience in Kipps, Falling Branch, and Auburn Elementary schools is that if you build a new school, people will move there and fill it up almost right away. These fill-ups were all unpredictable from a demographic point of view. So let's not get too stuck on demographic projections. I suppose it is that reasoning that is carrying the day at this point on the SB. And even though growth may not happen the way we are used to, it is just hard to imagine that the Blacksburg area is not in for significant growth. How scientific can we really be about these things? I'm just trying to set out the issues for you. Clearly this is a confusing but important matter. Wish us luck in making, or sticking with, the best choice! Comments, of course, are welcome.

Thanks for your interest in these matters. Sincerely,
Jim Klagge
District F Representative, and Chair
Montgomery County School Board.

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