Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 13, 1995 TAG: 9509130038
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The fast pace of residential sprawl in that part of the county is dictating the need for expanded school facilities, and the county is struggling to catch up. Better planning a few years ago would have helped. Better planning now is essential.
Cave Spring High School already is at capacity, with no room to grow. In fact, it is beyond capacity - the school does not have room for its freshman class. Spreading the ninth-graders between two junior high schools has meant overcrowding at Cave Spring Junior High. This situation led to an unpopular proposal, later dropped, to realign classes there and at Hidden Valley Junior High to even out their student populations.
Meanwhile, keeping the ninth grade at these schools blocks the development of middle schools for grades six through eight, the grouping most educators think is best suited for children.
In other words, the school system faces an array of interrelated problems involving the size and condition of facilities, and facility considerations are driving educational decisions, rather than vice versa.
Residential development in Southwest County has occurred at an unexpectedly fast pace. But the severe space crunch also suggests some disconnect between projections and plans, not to mention the Board of Supervisors' tendency at times to avoid confronting issues of growth.
Still, despite the increasingly urgent need for a new high school, it's clear in retrospect that the supervisors were right to decide against going immediately to voters for authority to issue $20 million in bonds to build one. This almost certainly would require a tax increase. Some supervisors judged, probably correctly, that the issue wouldn't pass in each of the county's magisterial districts. At the same time, chairman Lee Eddy pressed school officials to seek alternatives that might cost less.
All of which has led to delay that the schools can ill afford, but that promises a better outcome.
Long-range solutions are pushed even farther into the future, and immediate needs like air conditioning Cave Spring Junior High produce more controversy, given all the uncertainty. But the planning process that has resulted has attracted healthy civic involvement, and ensured intense scrutiny of overall construction needs - including the impact the facilities have on each other and on the overall educational program. (Which, by the way, has nothing to do with what size schools you compete against in football.)
And, after further study and a second community meeting next month on what the options will cost, residents will have a chance to be heard on not only what they want, but what they want to pay for.
There should be no doubt, after a decision is reached, that the county has explored the alternatives and chosen the plan that meets the educational needs of a locality that - like it or not - is taking on a new, urban status requiring careful planning and expensive capital outlays.
The supervisors should be able to get behind such a plan and push it, even if it requires that dreaded measure, an increase in taxes.
by CNB