The tone was set early in a joint work session between the Caroline County Board of Supervisors and the school board Tuesday night when School Board Chair Lydell Fortune mentioned agenda items that his body wanted to discuss.
“With all due respect, it’s not your meeting,” Supervisor Reginald Underwood said. “We have an agenda that we want to discuss, and that’s the agenda we’re going to discuss.”
Paramount to the supervisors’ agenda: a takeover of all future school construction projects.
Supervisor Nancy Long of the Port Royal District said the board will no longer provide a “blank check” to the schools when it comes to construction.
County Attorney Christopher Mackenzie advised his board that it is legally allowed to manage school projects if it follows the order of retaining control of the finances and the property during the construction process before transferring the title to the school division.
Supervisors said their distrust of the school board dates to the construction of Lewis & Clark Elementary School in 2008 and grew deeper several years later with the renovations of Bowling Green Elementary and Caroline High School.
They said at CHS, nearly the entire budget was spent before the schools realized the additions required more furniture and technology.
Former Caroline Building Official Kevin Wightman spoke at the meeting, recalling having to reassemble parts of Lewis & Clark, which he said had “holes everywhere.” He said it took months to fix the floor in the foyer of Bowling Green Elementary after a friend of a former school official supervised that project. Wightman said having the architect who is building the school manage the project “was kind of like the fox in the henhouse.”
The school board retorted that only one current member, Madison District representative Shawn Kelley, was on the board when those projects got underway, and Superintendent Sarah Calveric wasn’t on the staff, either. But Wightman noted that the county hired Construction Manager David Napier to oversee building projects, and schools should be no different.
“We hired this man, and we pay him good money to be our construction manager, whether it’s a school, whether it’s a firehouse, that’s the guy we decided three years ago that would oversee the construction of any county facilities,” Wightman said. “He has the expertise. He’s onsite. He can avoid delays. He can check technical specs to make sure what we’re putting in the ground and what we’re bringing up is right. So, I’m not quite sure why we would build a school and hire somebody when we already have that person on staff.”
The current project in question is one the school board isn’t even sure it wants. The board of supervisors pledged to add four to six classrooms and a gymnasium to Bowling Green Elementary to alleviate overcrowding at no cost to the schools.
Bowling Green District school board representative Michael Hubbard conducted an online survey about the project, and 97% of the 193 respondents supported the expansion.
After the supervisors called former School Board Chair Calvin Taylor to the podium during a meeting last year seeking an answer on the renovation project, Taylor said he would encourage his board to accept the supervisors’ proposal, in exchange for them releasing $1 million in reversion funds to the schools for the implementation of trailers at BGE.
The school board agreed, but the two boards couldn’t negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding to advance the project. The school board is now saying it was under duress when it agreed to the renovation. Superintendent Sarah Calveric said the schools were put in an “if-then position,” and it desperately needed the trailers for this school year.
“Mr. Taylor acknowledges that he should not have responded on behalf of the board in that situation, and we acknowledge that he never should’ve been put in the position to answer the question in the first place,” Reedy Church District school board representative JoWanda Rollins-Fells said. “So, we live and we learn.”
The supervisors provided the $1 million to add trailers to BGE earlier this school year as a temporary solution to ease capacity issues before a new school can be built. Fortune and Calveric expressed support for a new gymnasium at BGE because students currently traverse to the nearby community center for physical education classes.
However, they are not in support of the additional classrooms because they could eventually lead to more than 1,000 students in the school, making it more challenging to educate a population with a high percentage of at-risk students. The most recent Virginia Department of Education School Performance and Support Framework identified BGE as “needs intensive support.”
“There’s a concern that if the elementary school is expanded to a number that is far above what is educationally sound based on the research, that our ability to bring BGE where it needs to be will be severely impacted,” Fortune said.
The supervisors also suggested that their push to manage the construction of the BGE expansion wouldn’t be limited to that project, which irked normally-reserved school board member Allison Sears of the Western Caroline District.
Supervisor Clay Forehand said it’s his board’s belief that it is better suited to build large buildings than the school board. Sears said that sentiment wasn’t expressed in the MOU. She said the joint meeting “doesn’t feel very collaborative.”
“This [MOU] does not say we want to talk about every single building project that the school plans from now until however long,” Sears said.
Although the boards exchanged MOUs last year, their attorneys could not discuss them fully because the ideas were so divergent. Calveric and Rollins-Fells said the school board is not convinced it should surrender its lawful right to handle school affairs, noting that schools managing construction is the traditional practice in Virginia.
Rollins-Fells suggested both boards’ lawyers meet again and attempt to come up with an agreeable solution, declaring that would be the first step toward ending what Underwood called an “impasse.”
In other business, the supervisors voted Forehand as chair with Jeff Sili of the Bowling Green District serving as vice chair. On Monday, the school board voted 5-1 to support Fortune as chair and voted unanimously for Sears as vice chair. Hubbard nominated Taylor to serve a second term as chair, but the motion failed by a 4-2 margin, with only Hubbard and Taylor supporting it. Hubbard cast the lone dissenting vote on Fortune’s chair nomination.
