Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, November 11, 1993                   TAG: 9311110508
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-14   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: DUBLIN                                LENGTH: Medium

TASK FORCE FORMS 4 GROUPS TO STUDY SCHOOL BUILDINGS

Meeting at Pulaski County High School Tuesday night, the group organized into facilities, demographics, technology and finance subcommittees under the leadership of facilitator Tony Oliviera.

The facilities subcommittee will concentrate on the structures themselves.

The demographics subcommittee will look into the problem of a declining student enrollment over the past decade and what might be expected in population trends into the 21st century. Technology will study how computers and other advances fit into future classrooms, and finance will seek ways to pay for what is needed.

The meeting was to be limited to 90 minutes, but it went more than two hours as some of the subcommittees began discussing their various tasks.

``They're getting into it,'' Superintendent Bill Asbury said after making the rounds of the separate gatherings.

Asbury predicted that the subcommittees would be like ever-widening circles that eventually impinged on one another, as they found that recommendations in one area affected those in the others.

The drop over the years in numbers of students, for example, affects financing because state funding is calculated on the basis of attendance. Technology offers new and better ways of teaching, but equipment such as computers requires air-conditioning which can be difficult to install in old buildings. Increasing age of facilities also means the necessity to spend more money on just maintaining them.

The task force has no easy job in arriving at its recommendations to the joint commission, including members of the School Board and Board of Supervisors, that appointed its 41 members. It is being asked to deliver those recommendations by mid-January.

That is not a rigid deadline, but some of the issues being studied by the task force are pivotal to decisions the School Board must start making early in 1994.

Oliviera said he has been a facilitator for education groups on previous occasions as well as church groups, but never for such a diverse group as this. The joint commission tried to draw task force members from as wide an area of the community as possible.

The third meeting is set for 6 p.m. Dec. 7 in the school cafeteria.