ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 12, 1997 TAG: 9703120044
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: PULASKI
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER THE ROANOKE TIMES
Pulaski County is looking at future and immediate needs for its schools, and trying to gauge the costs.
The Pulaski County School Board knows what it needs for education in the coming year, but it doesn't know the price tag yet.
The School Board and the Board of Supervisors also looked beyond the 1997-98 school year at a possible school construction program, but that was in closed session Monday night under legal matters and property acquisition and disposition.
The two boards met first for 2 1/2 hours on more immediate needs in open session.
The School Board now has 11 portable classrooms at six schools. "All of them together now are housing more students than there are at Snowville or Draper" elementary schools, Superintendent Bill Asbury said. The board is looking at paying $80,000 for two more units next year.
But portable classrooms are a temporary fix only, School Board Chairman Lewis Pratt said. An alternative might be a major boundary adjustment for what schools are attended by what children, he said, but that depends on enrollment figures, which cannot be known now.
Another possibility, not a popular one, would be consolidating Riverlawn Elementary with other schools, Pratt said. None of that can be known until enrollment figures are more firm.
"Our budget is not ready," Pratt told the supervisors in outlining budget initiatives for the coming year. "These are the things we're looking at, things we're considering."
Those things included a 4 percent salary increase for teachers (they received 2.3 percent this year), two or three new elementary assistant principals, three more middle school teachers, three to five more special education teachers, another elementary guidance counselor, another elementary art teacher, two more aides for the in-school suspension program, and two new Critical Years/Critical Skills teachers.
Critical Years/Critical Skills has been the School Board's attempt at smaller classes in the early grades, so students can get a solid foundation to carry them through the rest of their schooling. It started several years ago.
"The teachers tell me this is the best thing that's happened in education in Pulaski County," said School Board member Rhea Saltz.
But the program has still not gotten early class numbers down to the 15 or 16 students, which was the goal, Asbury said. For next year,it will be more a matter of the program holding at 17 to 19 students per class, he said.
The School Board wants to increase the amount of time public health nurses are contracted to be in schools. "This is an attempt to get them in all of our schools at least two hours a day," Asbury said. They are not now in every school each day, which means office personnel must handle the dispensing of medications for the increasing number of children who take them.
It will cost an estimated $200,000 to replace and maintain computer technology equipment, and $36,600 for the telecommunications line charges required to support the computer laboratories in each school.
Another $500,000 will be needed for new K-12 science textbooks and new social studies textbooks. Publishers are scrambling to come up with a social studies book which will cover the material on which the state will require students to be tested, so the books themselves do not exist yet.
Social studies textbooks are usually updated every six years. "In our case, it's been 13 years," Asbury said. The county could not afford the new books at the end of one cycle and, at the next one, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and other nation changes, the books would have been instantly out of date.
"One, we couldn't afford. The other, world conditions changed," Asbury said.
Pratt said localities hear a lot about the 1997 General Assembly having made more money available for education in the coming year, but they don't hear about money that was taken away. "It may be simply a reshuffling of the pot," he said. "This is not new money that we're talking about."
LENGTH: Medium: 76 linesby CNB