Changes due in Charlottesville schools

By The Daily Progress

Published: January 13, 2009

It’s going to take quite a while to digest a 331-page report with such controversial recommendations as closing down a school.

Still, some preliminary observations are in order.

An educational consulting firm recently completed its five-month review of Charlottesville City schools and presented its report to the School Board.

Jo Ann Cox of MGT America said the system is failing to use space efficiently because of falling enrollment, and made 62 recommendations for change that could save up to $16.8 million.

Closing a school building was one of those recommendations.

Enrollment declines have been a fact of life for several years, and the trend is expected to continue.

The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia says the city has about 4,000 students now, which will drop to about 3,767 in another three years.

It costs money to run a building — lighting, heating, cooling, staffing. If the building is underutilized and classes can be consolidated elsewhere, it makes economic sense to do so.

Ah, staffing …

Just as it is often unpopular to close a school, removing a sense of pride from a neighborhood and imposing inconveniences on students and families, so it is controversial to cut staff.

The report recommended firing six of the division’s 11 assistant principals, cutting the number of instructional assistants by half and getting rid of 13 teachers.

Now, if enrollment has declined enough to justify closing one school, it has also declined enough to justify releasing one school’s worth of staff. Most of the proposed cuts come from instructional staff.

The report does, however, take a small whack at administration by eliminating nearly half of the school system’s assistant principals.

We suggest that the school system look higher. Should so many of the staff cuts come at the local school level?

In most government bureaucracies — and a public school division is both educational system and government bureaucracy — it is in central administration where the greatest efficiencies can be found.

The consultants said that Charlottesville’s central office staffing is appropriate for the system’s size. They may well be correct. But it’s worth taking another look to be sure.

Any such re-evaluation of course should be done without presupposition or bias: Central staffing may be spot on target, or may need to be cut (or increased, for that matter).

The Charlottesville School Board, school superintendent and the public will be taking second, third and fourth looks at all 62 recommendations for change.

Such an intense, and emotional, project cannot be accomplished quickly. As Superintendent Rosa S. Atkins has said, it’s too soon to be making judgments.

“Now we talk,” she said.

Exactly right.

And the School Board may well want to expand those talks to consider changes that even the consultants didn’t identify.