Wise County School Study.

[imported_ndn10]

whats the study on

Yes today is the day, at the school board meeting tonight.
My opinion is that it will be a bunch of generalizations and no real big shocking secret like everyone is thinking, I think they will basically say that every school needs air conditioning, new heat.....blah blah blah

Wise County's elementary and middle schools are fairly nice facilities, but the county's six high schools are in sore need of renovations from plumbing, electrical and HVAC basics to modern classroom improvements, Richmond analysts have advised in a study released to the school board and the public on Thursday.
William C. Bosher Jr., executive director of the Commonwealth Educational Policy Institute (CEPI), a part of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Education, delivered a summary of the study the Wise County School Board commissioned late last year.
The CEPI contract stipulated that the study make no recommendations about consolidation, and Bosher took pains to abide by that provision. However, Bosher said it would be disingenuous and "naive" of him to ignore an issue that was at the forefront of conversations with 400-plus residents when CEPI analysts visited the county.
"Our charge was not a consolidation report," Bosher said, but the issue was "in the frontal lobe" of practically everyone the CEPI team spoke with. Bosher urged the board to deal with the issue one way or another as quickly as possible so the board and taxpayers can focus on other matters. He said an unresolved consolidation spat can be "debilitating."
Bosher said high schools can be too big, and he is an advocate of smaller high schools. However, he said there is a point of diminishing returns, and there is such a thing as when small can be too small. He said even if the six county high schools were consolidated into three high schools, the three high schools would still be considered small by any standard.
Wise County is heavily dependent on state basic aid funding, the report noted, with 80 percent of its funding derived off the composite index - a formula that provides more state funds to poorer school divisions. Bosher said that is a limiting factor in which financial resources are directly linked to the county's diminishing K-12 enrollment.
Although all six high schools are in sore need of renovations, the report details how limited fiscal resources make renovations and broadening of academic programs a matter of tough policy decisions. Closure of one high school would save a conservative estimate of $200,000 annually, Bosher said, that could be applied elsewhere.
The report notes that Wise County's schools offer an excellent core curriculum but a limited offering of accelerated, fine arts and vocational/technical programs. The report observes that a "significant number" of students do not take accelerated courses that are available.
Wise County has a "very low but expensive" pupil-to-teacher ratio, with some classes having as few as six or seven students and the largest classes no more than 27. The county also has 444 non-county students attending its schools, and while they bring state basic aid dollars with them, Bosher estimated that Wise County taxpayers subsidize the non-resident students to the tune of as much as $1.3 million annually.
School board member Mark Hutchinson said Bosher mentioned nothing about central office structure and management, but Bosher said the report recommends a reduction in central office staff.
Consolidation remains the big gorilla stalking the discussion, however. In its report, CEPI acknowledges its analysts were "made very aware of the extent to which school consolidation was an issue of broad-based discussion and speculation within the community, among elected leaders and within the school system. CEPI made clear at that time that it has not and does not conduct school consolidation studies.
"The reason is that while resource availability and utilization are obviously important variables in such an issue, they are not the only variables. Others include the unique community needs, their visions for their schools, and the values as may be reflected in such a decision. As an academic institute we think it is not appropriate for distant consultants to decide these non-monetary and unique community values that ultimately are both legal and ethical issues between the communities and their elected representatives.
"It is, nevertheless, obvious that the outcomes of this resource management review will likely contain findings and recommendations that should prove helpful to the school division in the management of its resources in the context of the consolidation issue."

[imported_six4three]

so, where do we go next?