Schools would need to build 60 classrooms if bill passes
By Steve Herring
Published in News on March 24, 2017 9:57 AM
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News-Argus/SETH COMBS
Wayne County Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Michael Dunsmore speaks at a joint meeting between Wayne County commissioners and the Wayne County Board of Education Tuesday.
Wayne County would need to build more than 60 new classrooms should a General Assembly bill limiting classroom size become state law.
That would be on top of the 22 new classrooms already planned for in a $400,000 expansion project at Fremont STARS and Northwest elementary schools
"They are sending a check with that now for building that classroom?" Commissioner Joe Daughtery said during commissioners' Tuesday afternoon joint session with the school board.
"Nope," was the response of several school board members.
Wayne County Manager George Wood asked if it wouldn't be cheaper for the state to fund teacher assistants as opposed to forcing construction of new classrooms.
Dr. David Lewis, the school system's assistant superintendent for technology, accountability and testing, ran some numbers last year when the issue started turning up, schools Superintendent Dr. Michael Dunsmore said.
Dunsmore said he and school officials had met with Rep. John Bell and that the number was about 50 percent less to reinstate the teacher assistant allotment than go the direction the state is headed in.
Phil Berger, president pro tem of the state Senate, does not believe in the data, Dunsmore said.
"He is intent that we are going to do it this way, and that is the end of it," he said.
Dunsmore said that Bell and Rep. Jimmy Dixon have worked hard on behalf of the schools.
But at the moment the issue is a "political football," he said.
The General Assembly is proposing a mandatory 17-student per grade per class for kindergarten through third grade, Dunsmore said. Currently the limit is 21 for a systemwide average, he said.
But the county has the capability if students move in during the year that the limit can increase to 24, Dunsmore said.
"The house came back and realized that is going to be really hard for us to implement," he said. "That is House Bill 13 where they move that limit up where we could go three students over that. So it would make our cap 20."
It is bogged down in the Senate.
"For us to meet that class size I need 63 more teachers, 63 more classrooms," Dunsmore said.
There are already a large number of modular classrooms in the northern part of the county, he said.
'You all have graciously allotted that money so that we could build real classrooms for them," Dunsmore said. "But that 22 (classrooms) aside, I would need 63 classrooms above and beyond that."
Dunsmore said the county's legislative delegation is very supportive.
One of the things the legislators want the school board to do is to let commissioners know that if the 17-student limit becomes mandatory, that the school system has no leeway.
"So come the first day (of school), I have to have 17 kids in those classes," Dunsmore said. "And once we move on with that if I have students move in, I would have to create a new classroom, and we would have to keep expanding."
Dunsmore said it was not that he and other school officials are opposed to smaller class sizes because they know it helps students learn better.
"But we also know that we cannot implement that overnight," he said. "That is not fair to the citizens, or anybody else to take that financial hit for building, and even if they would, you can see from the Meadow Lane project it is a two-year turnaround to build them."
Dunsmore said he is sure commissioners have been reading how the government is going to do away with arts, music, gym and physical education.
They are not really being done away with, but rather looking at utilizing that classroom space because the teachers are not a line-item, state-funded position, he said.
"They are positions that we keep," he said. "The value of that is that I need classroom space because if I don't meet the letter of that law, they (the state) take money, they don't give it."
Dunsmore was asked about what the General Assembly had done on teacher assistants.
The General Assembly started cutting that line item down about seven years ago, he said. Most recently, legislators said they had fully funded the program, Dunsmore said.
However, it used to be the county was allotted a number of teacher assistants that could be placed throughout an elementary school.
That is no longer the case.
"Right now they are allotting us about 80 percent of the number for kindergarten, first and second grades," Dunsmore said. "So technically, by letter of law I can't put a teacher assistant in grades three, four and five."