Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 30, 1990 TAG: 9005300404
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But who are "the gifted"? And why should they be packed off, at significant state expense, to a public prep school?
On a 5-3 vote (absent was a fourth opponent), the board last week endorsed the concept of establishing such a school, if public and private support is forthcoming.
That's a big if.
Estimated cost of establishing the school ranges from $14 million (for 600 students in a facility already owned by the state) to $30 million (for 900 students in a new facility). Yearly per-student cost would exceed $13,000, far more than the highest-spending local division and triple the state average. To date, interest on the part of both the General Assembly and the private sector has been less than overwhelming.
Still, proponents said, the board should endorse the plan now so the project can stay alive until money is available. To the contrary, opponents said: The board should stress high-priority needs and not muddy things with symbolic gestures.
But there's another issue: Why the school at all? If by "the gifted" is meant prodigies, perhaps a case can be made for a hothouse education, for separating them from their communities, for segregating them from their non-prodigy classmates. Perhaps.
How many such prodigies, though, does Virginia have? Two? Four? Six?
If by "the gifted" is meant bright kids who thrive in an academic setting, Virginia has thousands. They aren't concert violinists at age 8, or neurosurgeons at 18, but they excel in the class room, and many of them are the commonwealth's future leaders.
How, though, does it help them to be plucked from their families and hometowns and isolated, at $13,000 apiece per annum, in a residential school? How does it help their hometown schools to be robbed of their classroom leadership?
No question, good students need challenging courses. No question, too, that the task can be difficult within a single school division; the smaller or poorer the division, as a rule, the greater the difficulty.
But Virginia already is discovering answers that stop considerably short of establishing a residential school far from many of its students' homes.
In larger divisions, "magnet" schools - though not designed simply to provide programs for good students - are having a desired effect.
School divisions of all sizes can benefit from cooperative, regional programs offering advanced courses that individual districts cannot. The Governor's School in Roanoke, for example, attracts top science students from several localities who spend half the day there, half in their home schools.
Meanwhile, the wide range in per-student spending among Virginia localities is undergoing scrutiny for good cause, as is the continued existence of very small schools. Solving those problems also could mean better courses for better students.
Such answers don't have the glitz of a residential school. But they don't cost up to $40 million to establish and $13,000 per student each year thereafter - nor do they treat Virginia's "gifted" students as a special caste to be spared the ignominy of mingling with the "ungifted" masses.
by CNB