The Gang of Five, who wasted $20 million on school facilites, continues the Blind Mice game | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

Mother Goose had her Three Blind Mice. Beaufort County has its Gang of Five.

    The people of Beaufort County were treated to an amazing scene in the reaction of some commissioners to a recent request from Dr. Don Phipps that the County fund a population study of the students in the school system.

    To understand this issue one must know that this Board, or at least a majority on the board, spent $39.6 million in a school construction program without ever knowing or even asking for how many students there were in the school system, or as Dr. Phipps says "how the students are distributed throughout the county and how that distribution will exist into the future." Reflect on that some. They spent $40 million on building classrooms withough knowing where the students who would fill those classrooms over the next 30 years would live.

    To fully understand what Dr. Phipps is requesting you need to pick up on his brief comment about the "Hite Study." The Commissioners knew what he was referring to. It is a study recently completed by architect Jimmy Hite of the buildings in the county. That study is a detailed inventory of each building, its condition and most importantly the capacity of each building as measured by state standards for the grades that might be assigned to that building at each school. That is important because for the first time in memory the school system now has solid data about how many students a school can house.

    Remember, this board's Gang of Five spent $40 million on new building construction, additions and renovation without know what the existing capacity of each building was before they added more classrooms. (Be sure to not let the significance of that fact allude you.) They spent $40 million wihout knowing what they already had.

    They also spent that $40 million knowing only how many students were enrolled at each school at that time. They had no data that showed what the student population patterns and trends were, except for the existing school attendance areas.

    Click here if you want to read a history of the $33 million bond issue (which turned into a $40 million boondoggle.)

    What follows Dr. Phipps' brief presentation was an amazing exhibition of ignorance shown by the comments from Commissioners Al Klemm and Jay McRoy.

    Mr. Klemm's question was: "what will this study tells us?" Dr. Phipps was apparently so taken aback by the question he simply repeated what he had just said. We'll come back to Mr. Klemm's absurd question in a bit.

    Mr. McRoy's comments were a suggestion that in effect contended that all they need (for sound facilities planning) is to know the enrollment trends in each school.

    Take a listen:



    Commentary

    Remembering that Mr. McRoy was chairman of this board during much of the bond issue fiasco, here is the short version of why his ignorance as revealed in his comments is so astounding.

    There are two basic things anyone has to know to properly plan school facility construction and maintenance. You have to know what you have in buildings and the condition of those buildings, both in terms of suitability (capacity to support the instructional program being carried out) and short-term and long-range maintenance. While the Gang of Five never ask for that information before it spent $40 million, it now has this information from the Hite Study.

    The second thing you have to know is how many students you now have and how many you will have in the future and where those students are located now and where they will likely be located in the future. That is what Dr. Phipps was asking for.

    Now here's the immediate absurdity of Mr. McRoy's planning model. If all you know is how many students are located within each school's current attendance area (that geographical area served by that particular school) what that does not tell you is whether the configuration of those attendance areas makes the most efficient use of the existing and future facilities.

    For example, if you have three schools housing the same grades in adjoining attendance areas and one of the schools is under capacity and the neighboring school is over capacity and the third school is over capacity but declining in population in part of its attendance area but growing in another part, it is obvious that you need to look at reconfiguring the attendance area boundaries.

    And another example with flies in the face of Mr. McRoy's professed knowledge of Chocowinity, is when you have a feeder pattern that does not conform to generally accepted educational standards, you have to wonder why he would not want to review those feeder patterns. What exists, which Mr. McRoy would apparently lock into stone, is a non-conventional grade structure at both Chocowinity Primary (K-4) and Chocowinity Middle (5-8).

    And they have the same thing with regard to where they built the new P. S. Jones Middle School. Bath is a K-8 school that adjoins the underutilized Jones. But no one ever mentioned the idea of looking at building Jones closer to Bath and taking the 6-8 students from Bath to relieve the need to build more classrooms at Bath, which was done with bond funds.

    Then you have Snowden. That is quite possibly the most "overbuilt" school in the state. And one reason it is overbuilt is because that area has suffered from "student flight" for years and the flight shows no signs of abatement, with many of the white students in the Aurora area going to school in Pamlico County and others "fleeing" to Chocowinity, because of Federally mandated choice, the most overcrowded schools in the system. Likewise, Mr. McRoy's approach ignores the most significant demographic affecting the school system--the growth of home schooling, private schools and schools of choice/charter schools. Mr. McRoy has no clue where the students enrolled in alternative schools live or what the trends and patterns of "choice" are.

    And of course there is the "unitary" feeder system in the Washington attendance area which causes a massive busing program to be imposed on the taxpayers and students, some of whom are bused past two school to get to the school they attend which is much further from their home than a multiple K-5 feeder pattern would allow.

    So to Mr. Klemm we would suggest that a solid student locator system is essential in considering alternative feeder patterns in the Washington area...something that should have been done before he voted to build P. S. Jones and John Small where they were built. One has to wonder if he actually knows the first grade students in his own neighborhood (near the Pitt County line) are bussed all the way to the opposite side of Washington to Eastern Elementary.

    We could go on. But all of those examples illustrate why any school system needs an accurate student locator system. And no knowledgeable person in school planning would tell you that locking in your attendance areas to those that existed before you spend $40 million makes any sense whatsoever. But that is exactly what Mr. McRoy is talking about doing.

    Moreover, as Dr. Phipps says, knowing the current enrollment and cohort projections, totally ignores other essential planning data such as recent census data, subdivision planning, building permits, and utilities capacity and planning.

    So to Mr. Klemm we would simply say: What a student locator data base tells you is how to make the most efficient use of existing facilities and where you can plan to contract and expand capacity. One has to wonder how he could have sat on a board that spent $40 million on new school facilities without ever having wondered whether it makes any difference where the students are located and where they are going to be located during the life of those new facilities. Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

    But to Mr. McRoy we would simply say: Now we better understand why they wasted over $20 million as he sat as chairman of this board while the schools he claims to "know the most about (Chocowinity)" got the short end of the facilities planning stick on his watch. No wonder he forgot about Phase II of the bond program. Amazing. Absolutely amazing, especially when you realize he forgot the 10 classroom addition for Chocowinity when he voted to overspend at Snowden, Jones, Small and Bath.

    The irony in all this is that Al Klemm and Jay McRoy, along with Jerry Langley, Ed Booth and Robert Cayton never questioned Jeff Moss when Moss was blowing smoke about school construction. They never challenged him when he went $6.4 million over budget. But now they have a superintendent who is doing his job the way it should be done and they challenge him on spending $17,000 on a project that will surely save millions of dollars, in contrast to their record since 2004.

    Folks, you could not make up a story as crazy as this if you wanted.