Bertie High Targeted For $2 Million Renovation

by Cal Bryant - April 4th, 2007 - Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald

In their meeting here yesterday (Monday) morning, the Bertie County Board of Commissioners approved two resolutions that will pave the way for $2 million in much-needed renovations to the 40-plus-year-old high school.

In his presentation to the commissioners, Bertie Schools Interim Superintendent Dr. Michael Priddy suggested the $2 million be applied to install a new roof and for new heating and cooling units at Bertie High.

“The high school is not in very good shape,” Dr. Priddy said. “The question becomes do we replace it or improve it?”

The most important aspect of this question is its impact on the education of our children. Though it was built back in the 60s, our current high school has the potential to be an excellent physical facility if its shortcomings are fixed. There is every indication they can be fixed. Colleges all over America use buildings for 100 to 200 years by maintaining them and periodically upgrading them, not replacing them. The cost effectiveness of this is well established. Building new schools and new school buildings should be done only when there is significant student growth that justifies it.

Even if Bertie County could get the $30 million in bonds to build a new high school, there are two reasons why this should not be attempted.

First, building the middle school has proved that any school construction sucks huge amounts of time from school administrators, diverting their attention from the education of our children into the details of a construction project. This is not what we pay them for. It is a contributing factor in the reason our children are not getting a good education right now. So much time and energy spent trying to build a high school that could not be funded and then additional time spent on the new middle school. It is built now, but when you go look at the new school don't forget that during the entire time it was constructed, our children's test scores continued to deline. Not a legacy I would be proud of.

Second, Bertie County is not growing. Construction of a new high school would leave one more empty building sitting in Bertie County's huge warehouse of abandoned schools. The image of wastefull use of tax payer assets is not what we need to communicate at a time when Bertie County is trying to reverse decades of economic slippage. Even if we get a huge bond money windfall from the state, Bertie County tax payers will still be stuck paying off a major portion of these bonds. That will raise our already too high tax rates. Any funds we get can be more effectively spent upgrading and fixing existing buildings. This can be done in small increments that does not consume education administration resources. This leaves us with better overall facilities for less money.

The best sign is the way this issue is being handled by the County Commissioners and the Board of Education. They are working together for our children. The Board of Education sent Dr. Priddy to request the County Commissioners trust the BOE would live up to their part of the process needed. On Monday night, the BOE voted to execute the program they had asked the Commissioners to support, as they had promised to do.

This is encouraging as an indication that the coming budget process will also be focused on what is best for the children. We need both the BOE and the County Commissioners to continue this cooperation until our children are getting the education focus that they deserve.