THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 2, 1996 TAG: 9610020591
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SUFFOLK LENGTH: 72 lines
Suffolk's mushrooming residential growth means overflowing classrooms and the need to renovate, expand and build public schools sooner rather than later, a Blue Ribbon Committee will tell the School Board and City Council today.
The committee proposes in its 43-page report that the city build a new middle school and renovate or expand both city high schools, three elementary schools and a middle school in the next three years - all earlier than now scheduled in the School Board's 10-year building plan.
The 11-member committee also recommends closing two outdated elementary schools in rural southern sections of the city by 1998: Robertson and Southwestern. The School Board already has planned two new elementary schools in the central and southern areas of the city to open in 1998.
Committee chairman Charles O. Christian, a retired teacher, coach and Norfolk State University professor, declined Tuesday to discuss specifics of the recommendations before today's presentation. The committee, he said, felt the school system was doing a good job in spite of the physical limitations of many schools, and didn't think its children were being shortchanged.
Still, the committee wanted to bring attention to the school system's needs and to ``what's going to just be best for our kids.''
``Maybe this will bring some focus to that, and hopefully it will,'' Christian said.
The Blue Ribbon Committee was appointed by the City Council in September 1995 to study the city's growth and review the 10-year, $105.7 million capital-improvement plan the School Board approved the same month.
The panel of 11 educators, parents, business people and builders began meeting at least biweekly in January to tour schools, solicit residents' comments and study population and school-enrollment growth.
It found that at the end of the 1995-96 school year, Suffolk's 15 public schools were squeezing in 2,070, or 20 percent, more students than they were designed to hold.
This meant the district already had enough students to fill four new schools like Northern Shores Elementary, which opened in September. The committee also noted that when schools opened last month, 12 mobile classrooms were added to the 81 already in use; such units house 20 percent of the city's public schoolchildren, and more than a third of its elementary students.
The latest enrollment figures for this fall show that the school system has grown by 568 students since last spring, to 10,702. That's 5.6 percent, or almost 23 classrooms' worth. The growth is mostly to the rapidly developing northern section of the city, and it's expected to increase.
``Of course, this means we will need new schools to house these students, and the time to act is now,'' the report said.
Also cited as chronic problems were too-small gymnasiums and auditoriums, lack of private conference and testing space for special-education programs, and a lack of high-school technology laboratory space that bars students from taking such classes.
``It is the opinion of the committee that it is in the best interest of all students to include the variety of programming that the school system provides,'' the report reads. ``Adequate and appropriate physical space is necessary'' for such programs.
Among the committee's recommendations that differ from or add to the existing building plan:
Add auxiliary gyms and 15 classrooms each to Lakeland and Nansemond River high schools by 1999, and house all technology-based programs in a technology center. This would allow a delay of three years for a planned new high school, to 2005.
Expand Florence Bowser Elementary School by 1998, and Driver Elementary School by 1999.
Renovate John Yeates Middle School by 1998, Booker T. Washington Elementary School by 1999 and John F. Kennedy Middle School by 2000.
Build a new middle school three years earlier, by 1999, but delay a third new elementary school one year until 2004.
The committee will present its report at 3 p.m. in City Council Chambers.
KEYWORDS: SUFFOLK SCHOOLS by CNB