Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 25, 1995 TAG: 9509250021
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL TURNER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
To Kristen Brown, it seems Cave Spring Junior High School is the outcast of the Roanoke County school system.
If any county school deserves air conditioning, it is Cave Spring Junior, said Brown, an eighth-grader there.
The school is nearly 40 years old and overcrowded. Students bump into each other in the narrow halls and squeeze into small classrooms.
Cave Spring Junior's enrollment is 936; it's built to hold 775. The school is using eight mobile classrooms this year.
``It is unfair that Hidden Valley Junior High has air conditioning, but they are not crowded,'' Brown said last week.``We need it more because we are so crowded, and it gets so hot in the rooms.''
Sarah Day, a ninth-grader, agreed. ``It gets so hot that you can't concentrate sometimes. I have to pull up my sleeves, but that doesn't help.''
Cave Spring Junior is the only one of the county's 27 schools that is not air-conditioned or scheduled for it soon.
Bent Mountain and Fort Lewis elementary schools do not have air conditioning, but are scheduled to get it in the next few years.
Cave Spring Junior students are disappointed and upset by the Board of Supervisors' refusal to provide $2.5 million for air conditioning, electrical upgrades and other improvements at the school.
Supervisor Bob Johnson said it didn't make good business sense to spend $2.5 million on a school that might be closed in a few years.
But the students expect that the school will be used at least several more years. They said air conditioning and other improvements are needed in the meantime.
``It will take a long time to build a new school,'' said David Good, a seventh-grader. ``It will cost a lot more to build a new school than to put in air conditioning here.''
``We've been around much longer than Hidden Valley, and we deserve air conditioning,'' said Michael Lilley, a seventh-grader. ``The decision [by the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors] was stupid. Even if they build a new junior high school, it will take years.''
Some students and teachers said that it's an issue of health as well as comfort.
Stephen Austin, a seventh-grader, said a student passed out in one of his classes last year because of the heat.
A teacher who did not want to be identified said one of her students has gone home for health reasons because the classroom was so hot. ``It can be a health problem for some children,'' she said.
Principal Steven Boyer said the temperature sometimes gets above 90 degrees in classrooms.
Ceiling fans were installed in the classrooms several years, ago and most teachers have fans. But the students said the fans do not keep them cool.
``After gym, when you're so hot, you have to go into a hot classroom,'' said Lauren Babich, an eighth-grader. ``It's horrible.''
Another eighth-grader, Jessica Trompeter, said: ``You can't think when you are hot. That's the only thing you can think of.''
Stuart Sibley, a sixth-grade teacher, agreed that it sometimes is difficult for students to remain in an academic frame of mind late in the day when the temperature exceeds 90 degrees.
Despite the disappointment with the supervisors' decision, Boyer said, students and teachers stay focused on their work and rarely complain about the conditions.
The electrical system and lighting in the school also are outdated. Most classrooms have only two electrical outlets - limiting the number of computers, overhead projectors, televisions, fans and other equipment that can be used.
``It gets a little tricky sometimes. You have to unplug some things when you want to use something else,'' Boyer said.
The light is dim in some classrooms and halls. It's difficult to regulate the heat in some rooms during the winter.
The art and choir rooms are overcrowded. Forty-eight students squeezed into the small choir room for teacher Sue Giles' class on Thursday.
Paint is peeling on heating ducts in the choir room and on windows in the gymnasium that were painted to keep out the afternoon sun. The ceilings in some halls have been stained by leaky roofs.
The cafeteria, which seats 250, is so small that four lunch periods - the first starting at 10:20, the last at 12:50 - are needed to feed the students.
Boyer, who has been principal for seven years, hopes the overcrowding doesn't get worse. The mobile classrooms have been installed in the past three years to accommodate the growing enrollment.
An earlier proposal called for Cave Spring Junior to be closed when the county builds a high school to replace Cave Spring High. That plan called for the high school to be converted into a middle school, eliminating the need for Cave Spring Junior.
But school officials have told consultants who are studying schools in Southwest County to consider all possibilities, including the renovation of Cave Spring Junior.
If the consultants recommend that the school be renovated instead of closed, School Board Chairman Jerry Canada said, school officials may ask the supervisors to reconsider their decision.
But Cave Spring Junior students don't believe that air conditioning and other improvements at their school should hinge on the rest of the plan.
``Every other school has air conditioning. Why shouldn't we?'' asked Matt Williams, an eighth-grader.
by CNB