ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, November 15, 1996 TAG: 9611150025
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
ROANOKE school officials want to start planning now for new high-school facilities that won't be completed until the year 2004. Good for them.
Starting now creates an opportunity. The business-as-usual task of replacing or refurbishing buildings at Patrick Henry and William Fleming high schools as they start to wear out can be transformed into the exciting challenge of improving city schools in innovative ways to meet the educational imperatives of a new century.
The key point about Superintendent Wayne Harris' timetable is that educational considerations come first. For four years, and with ample avenues for public input, the academic needs of the not-so-distant future are to be thoroughly studied. Only after that are the proposed physical improvements to be designed, financed and constructed.
In other words, ideally anyway, the physical configuration of Roanoke's high-school facilities will follow, rather than dictate, the schools' curricular and programmatic configuration.
If this approach seems nothing more than common sense, it has been as much the exception as the rule in public education. Indeed, a few critics have suspected that some unsuccessful education "reforms" of the past, like open classrooms, were excuses to justify spending less than otherwise would be needed for school construction.
In any case, extraneous factors - the desire to maintain a high school for its sports traditions, for example - have a way of assuming too much importance. Educators and the public alike sometimes find it difficult to think in untraditional ways about schools.
Should Roanoke continue to have two comprehensive high schools? Or consolidate them into just one? Or build several smaller high schools? Or adopt some combination of big and small?
By national standards, Roanoke's Patrick Henry and William Fleming high schools aren't megaschools But at more than 1,700 and 1,400 students respectively, they are the biggest high schools in the Roanoke Valley, and roughly twice as large as what some researchers have identified as ideal for educational purposes.
Technological advance is also a consideration: The computer age both imposes new demands on schools' educational programs and affords new opportunities for more flexibility in the configuration of school systems' physical facilities.
Many school divisions are so busy playing catch-up - trying to relieve overcrowding or replace already-outworn structures - that they can't enjoy the luxury of waiting until implications of future curricular needs can be more thoroughly explored. This may be the case in Roanoke County, where uneven enrollment growth has led to overcrowding in the Cave Spring area. Failure of a proposed school-construction bond issue - rejected earlier this year by county voters, in part because of a perception that the planning was too ad hoc - has left the situation unresolved.
City school officials can't be credited for the relative compactness and population stability of their district. They can be credited for taking advantage of this situation, and for recognizing the importance of planning in putting the educational-needs horse before the capital-needs cart.
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