The Caroline County School Board is moving forward with its short-term plan to address overcrowding in two of its three elementary schools.
The board on Monday voted unanimously to support Mattaponi District representative Lydell Fortune’s motion to keep pre-K at individual schools rather than move them to a centralized location in the current administrative building.
The board also came to a consensus that it plans to build a new elementary school within the next four years and will establish “learning cottages” or trailers on the campuses of Bowling Green Elementary and Lewis and Clark Elementary as a temporary solution to manage overcrowding until the new school is built.
The board did not hold a vote on those matters.
Fortune said it was important to put the pre-K discussion into a motion because the school division is applying for a grant to fund supplemental playgrounds at the elementary schools, specifically for pre-K students.
“The ambivalence was impacting our application to get funding for the playground,” Fortune said.
Part of the uncertainty stemmed from the Caroline Board of Supervisors voting 4-2 to fund moving Bowling Green PreK students to the administrative building, and Lewis and Clark’s PreK to the current Lotus Academy alternative school in Ladysmith.
The supervisors also voted to add classrooms to BGE, against the wishes of Superintendent Sarah Calveric, who stated that the addition would put the school over 1,000 students, which is not an ideal size for elementary schools, and which impacts learning, according to research.
“One thousand-plus [student] elementary schools is not the right size,” Reedy Church District school board member JoWanda Rollins-Fells said.
In Virginia, the board of supervisors is responsible for funding public schools through local taxes, but school boards manage the budget and allocate funds. Some community members expressed concern that the line was being blurred by the supervisors’ offering and voting on recommendations to address overcrowding.
“As you know, we are in a crunch,” School Board Chair Calvin Taylor said. “We have some space issues, and we are trying to figure out the best way to address them. It’s not about laying blame … It’s about children and making sure we find a way to serve our students in the best way possible.”
The supervisors who supported the move of the PreK students also said they would rather not place trailers on school grounds. But Calveric and the board researched the potential of trailers and plan on moving forward.
Taylor visited Stafford County on Monday to examine trailers on its school grounds. The two counties are in preliminary discussions about the sale of the trailers now that Stafford is in the process of opening new school buildings.
School officials also visited Louisa County to view its current “learning cottages” up close.
“After the [2011] earthquake in Louisa, the entire high school was in learning cottages, for I believe, four years,” Taylor said. “It just goes to show that you do what you have to do for children. We hopefully don’t have to do that, but whatever direction we go, we’re going to choose the best direction to meet the needs of our students.”
Bowling Green District school board member Michael Hubbard said that it may appear to the community that the board did “a 180” on trailers after previously being opposed to them.
But Rollins-Fells said circumstances were different at the time.
“It was proposed in the context of other dynamics,” Rollins-Fells said. “I don’t think that the narrative is correct to say, ‘One minute we thought this and the next minute we thought that,’ when you pull it out of context.”
The context Rollins-Fells alluded to is that the school board’s hope to purchase the former Atlantic Union Bank headquarters in Carmel Church for central office and preschool space, but the building is no longer on the market and is being bought by Rappahannock Electric Cooperative.
With that building and the space it offered out of the equation, the school board said it is prudent to keep the pre-K students on their current grounds where they’ll have access to physical education, music, art and library classes.
“It’s a disservice to say, ‘We will give you part of what we know you need, but not the whole of what we know you need, when we can provide it,” Rollins-Fells said. “If I recall, that was the driver for pulling pre-K students out of [what is now central office] … We put them into the home school because there was a sense of belonging. There was a sense of community and there was continuity in service.”
