ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603160004
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETTY STROTHER
IF I HAD known I was going to be climbing around a construction site, I would have worn tennis shoes to work, I thought as I enviously eyed Pat Zirkle's sensibly shod feet.
In a flash, she had lost her black pumps and slipped into tennies, while I was caught flat-footed in black flats with leather soles split from side to side. But then, Pat has good reason to be prepared for roughing it these days. As an assistant principal at Glenvar High School, she is giving tours of what will be the middle-school addition to lots of people.
I hadn't expected to be one of them. But I was curious about all the complaints from parents of Glenvar students angry about Roanoke County's proposal to float a big bond issue for a new high school in Southwest County. The overcrowded hallways and inadequate facilities at Cave Spring Junior High School are well-documented. The need for a new high school that can accommodate the ninth-grade class is clear. The booming growth in Southwest County is undeniable.
But what about the Glenvar students? While the county seeks megabucks for the affluent Cave Spring area, are Glenvar kids getting short shrift?
Come see, Pat urged.
Glenvar Middle School is still all concrete walls and floors, exposed wiring and open air where windows eventually will be. But already it has the makings of a well-laid-out school: its own administrative office complex (where a full-time principal will work), its own gym (smaller than some would like), its own showers and locker rooms, its own science labs, its own computer lab next to a reading room, its own special-education classrooms, its own lecture hall (with seating for about 120), and, of course, its own classrooms for sixth and seventh grades.
It doesn't have classrooms for the eighth grade. Those will be along one corridor of the high school that is to flow into the second floor of the middle-school addition via a walkway. It doesn't have its own cafeteria or full library. And, while it has a new art room, that won't be all its own. Middle-school students will have to share cafeteria, library and art room with the high school.
Less than ideal? Sure. Inadequate? Far from it, from where I'm viewing things.
Walking from the construction site back to the existing school, Pat and I were stopped by a set of locked doors. She peered through a glass panel and signaled to a student to let us in. "You behave in silent lunch?" she asked him as he headed into a classroom. Well, sort of, he said sheepishly, his head dipping slightly. "Sort of? Either you did or you didn't, there's no 'sort of,''' she cheerfully observed. He let the door swing closed. Close one.
"You got your hair cut," she commented as we passed another boy, at his locker. He and all the kids we saw in the nearly deserted halls responded with a friendly greeting.
"They're the sweetest children here," Pat said. "I just love them all." The parents opposing the county bond referendum only want the best for these kids. "They have gone to Byrd Middle School and seen that is a self-contained building at Byrd Middle. And they say, 'Don't our children deserve that?' Absolutely. And they're going to get the same services."
But not a free-standing building. Why? Not because Cave Spring needs a new high school, but because there are only 605 students at Glenvar in grades seven through 12. Bringing in the sixth grade with the opening of the middle school next year will increase that number by 110. There will be 220 to 225 children in the new building next year. Counting the eighth-graders in the adjoining building, there will be about 325 Glenvar Middle School children.
And if both the seventh and eighth grades had been taken out of the high school, Pat said, "we would have had nine empty classrooms."
When the addition is complete, the county will have spent $4.2 million on it. That is a whole lot less than the $33 million proposed for a new Cave Spring High School. But only $25 million of it is for what school officials call "brick and mortar," actual construction of the building, Superintendent Deanna Gordon pointed out in an earlier phone conversation. It's still a lot of brick and mortar, but that $25 million will be for 1,900 students, compared to 325. Per-student costs are comparable.
People grieving what they don't have at Glenvar Middle "think that at Cave Spring we are going to build a Cadillac facility. But [Cave Spring planners] already are in the process of cutting back their wish list," the superintendent said. "We have never been able to deliver everything that a community wanted in its facility."
That is simply investment in buildings, though. Stronger evidence of the county's commitment to Glenvar is the fine academic program it is able to offer, despite its low enrollment.
"Roanoke County has always funded us in terms of teachers we need to teach the classes," Pat said. She teaches an advance-placement calculus class of six, and there are a number of other courses with fewer than 10 children. "They have been very flexible with us over many years," she said of school administrators.
"We are going to provide the very best education possible for our children, and we're going to have the things we need to do it with."
And parents who are vowing to vote against the county's bond referendum? "It's like all of a sudden now, this small environment is what they don't want."
It has its disadvantages, true. But, oh, the advantages.
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