Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 3, 1993 TAG: 9305030310
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FAIRFAX LENGTH: Long
For the next six hours, he and more than 1,300 classmates hustle among three buildings on the campus of West Potomac High School, the biggest school in the 10th-largest school division in the country.
Each evening, he loads groceries into cars at an Alexandria supermarket, then returns to his home in the Washington suburbs - one of the wealthiest areas in the nation.
Brad Dalton's school day in rural Carroll County starts an hour later than Strudgeon's. He and roughly 1,000 classmates study all day within the walls of the same building.
When school lets out, he drives to his grandfather's general store in Hillsville, where he fills pop coolers, rings up sales and carries grocery bags for customers. His county ranks among the state's poorest.
But not so his education, Dalton said last week after sitting through three days of classes at West Potomac.
"I'm not sure that they're learning different things," he said. "Sometimes it seems that they're learning the same things in different ways."
Dalton spent a week at the Fairfax County school as part of an exchange program between 50 Northern and Southwestern Virginia students and 10 of their teachers. This week, as the group moves south, Strudgeon will see what it's like to go to school in a county more saturated with hayfields than national politics.
He'll see plenty of cultural differences, according to Dalton and those who traded the peaks of the Blue Ridge last week for a panorama thick with strip malls, commercial buildings and fast-food signs.
He may see smaller school buildings, fewer computers and less abundant course offerings, they said.
But he won't see anybody getting shortchanged in the classroom.
"I came up here expecting a big difference in education, equipment and stuff," said David Manley, a junior at Fort Chiswell High School in Wythe County.
"You could tell some difference," he said last Wednesday, "but it wasn't as dramatic as I thought."
More money doesn't necessarily equal better education, was the consensus from those who ventured north, straight into the politics of disparity. Their impressions raise questions about an issue that has divided the state for several years.
A coalition of the state's poorest school divisions - among them Bland, Carroll and Wythe counties and the city of Galax - took the state to court after the General Assembly failed to correct what they saw as an unfair division of money among Virginia's 134 school districts.
The Virginia Education Association is backing the suit, which has been appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court.
The exchange program - the brainchild of Dels. Thomas Jackson, D-Hillsville, and Linda Puller, D-Fairfax - attempts to focus attention on how where a child lives can dictate the quality of education he or she receives.
It also hopes to bridge some of the cultural gaps between the two areas by showing students how people live in other parts of the state, Puller said.
She and Jackson want to continue the program with a business leaders exchange in the fall and a second student exchange next year.
The swap may be bringing some unanticipated results.
Southwestern Virginia schools could certainly benefit from more money, the exchange students said. But they didn't feel cheated when they saw what an extra $2,000 per student was buying their northern cousins.
"I don't really understand why it costs that much, because the classes aren't that different," said Jason Walls, a junior at Galax High School.
What's different, he said, is the vast racial diversity at J.E.B. Stuart High School in Falls Church, where immigrants - from Africa to El Salvador - speak as many as 47 languages.
Many can't read or write in their native tongues, let alone English. That means a curriculum heavy with classes in English as a second language.
"The money, I think, is going toward all the [English] teachers," Walls said.
Indeed, the lion's share of every school board's operating budget pays for teachers' salaries, which are nearly twice as high in Northern Virginia. But the classes are roughly the same size, the students said, and the quality of teaching on par.
Many of the inequities that struck the students had little to do with money, such as easy access to Washington, D.C.
"This environment, being in the nation's capital, is a lot more conducive to learning," Manley said.
For example, West Potomac's Latin class took a field trip to the Library of Congress last week, an event nearly unheard of for Fort Chiswell students.
"They treat it as no big deal," Manley said of the suburban students.
Summer Higgins, a sophomore from Carroll County, said she learned a lot just staying with her Fairfax host family, which had traveled extensively with the military.
"They've been all over the world," she said.
Another student remarked that Southwestern Virginia schools might improve by simply assigning as much homework as those in Northern Virginia.
"I don't like doing homework," said Susan Roberts, a Wythe County sophomore, "but it would benefit if maybe we had a little bit more."
Strudgeon wouldn't mind having a little less.
"Hopefully, when I go down there, it'll be like more of a vacation," he said last week. "What is there to do? Go to church?"
by CNB