Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 17, 1990 TAG: 9003162569
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KATHY LOAN SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: PEARISB LENGTH: Medium
But declining enrollment, with an accompanying $500,000 drop in state basic aid as well as $900,000 in extra mandated expenses for the 1990-91 school year, helped them make that tough decision.
Rich Creek Elementary will be closed after this school year and its students transferred to Narrows Elementary. King Johnston Elementary in Pearisburg will be closed at the end of the 1990-91 school year.
A special program for pupils who have trouble adjusting to a regular classroom will be moved from a building behind King Johnston to Narrows High School. The "Positive Approach Toward School" program provides academic and vocational education in a stricter learning environment for these pupils.
Three transition teams made up of administrators, teachers and community members are being established to work out problems that arise as closing plans progress.
Although the motion by School Board member Phillip Morris to accept Superintendent Robert McCracken's recommendation to close the two schools eventually passed unanimously, none of the other four board members seemed eager to second the motion Wednesday night. But after about 20 seconds of silence, Chairman J.B. Buckland kept the motion alive.
"I think the board regrets having to consider this action. It's something . . . we have put off," Buckland said before the vote. "We kept hoping there would be an increase in students." But Buckland said the latest live birth rates for the county, used to project future school enrollment, were the lowest they had been in a long time. "I see no way out of it."
Board members stressed that the decision was not made in haste.
Kerry Gillispie said the county had tried to generate higher enrollment numbers, but it "has been a losing situation. We continually come in with negative losses on monthly reports."
"It's not the easy way out, it's the only way out," Morris said.
Board member J. Lewis Webb said he was pleased that the recommendation avoided placing rising seventh-graders at either of the two county high schools. Giles and Narrows high schools include grades eight through 12.
Phyllis Rampey, who has five children and who attended the meeting, agreed with Webb. She said she even preferred that eighth-grade students not be included in a high school.
When her family moved to the county from another state in 1982, her eighth-grade son became a first-year high school student when he would have been a third-year middle-school student at the school system he left.
"I don't think [seventh- and eighth-grade pupils] are mentally ready," she said, to be put in an educational and social setting with older high school students.
In other business Wednesday, McCracken updated the board on plans to strengthen the school system's ties with Hoechst Celanese in Narrows, the county's largest employer. The plant manufactures acetate filament yarn used in filters for cigarettes and materials for clothing.
A committee decided a Teacher Exchange Program with the plant would be one way of accomplishing this.
As proposed, a teacher would spend a summer at Celanese, working with plant officials to learn what they expect from graduates hoping to obtain jobs there.
McCracken also noted that tentative dates for summer school are June 15-July 6 and July 9-July 27. There will be no classes July 4.
by CNB