Collegiate Times

Montgomery County School Board Superintendent Brenda Blackburn addresses almost 300 audience members Monday night at BMS.

The Blacksburg High School community expressed its frustration with the Montgomery County School Board as it examined numerous solutions for where and how students will attend school in the fall.

School Board Superintendent Brenda Blackburn spoke to two groups Monday at Blacksburg Middle School, and two Tuesday at Christiansburg Middle School. The Monday afternoon gathering was reported by the Roanoke Times to have attracted about 150 parents, teachers, community members and students, while around 300 attended the identical meeting at 7 p.m. The Tuesday meetings were said to have attracted around 200 and then fewer than 100 attendees, according to the Roanoke Times.

During the Monday night meeting, Blackburn said that the option of opening BHS in the fall after conducting repairs is off the table.

“As much as we all had hoped, that is not the case,” she said.

As opposed to five options offered to the community at last Tuesday’s school board meeting, Blackburn offered only four Monday night. Blackburn also offered cost estimates for all plans, the accuracy of which were questioned by some audience members.

The plans are:

— Use BMS for Blacksburg students in grades nine through 12, putting its enrollment at 1,117 students. Use the old Christiansburg Middle School for Blacksburg students in grades six through eight, putting its enrollment at 883. This plan would cost about
$893,000.

— Use BMS for Blacksburg students in grades eight through 12, putting its enrollment at 1,412 students. Send Blacksburg students in grades six and seven to the current CMS along with all Christiansburg students in grades six through eight, putting its enrollment at 1,410. This plan would cost about $1 million.

— Use BMS for Blacksburg students in grades eight through 12, putting its enrollment at 1,414 students. Use the old CMS for Blacksburg students in grades six and seven, putting its enrollment at 588. This plan would cost about $693,000.

— Use the old CMS for Blacksburg students in grades nine through 12, putting its enrollment at 1,117. Allow Blacksburg students in grades six through eight to remain at BMS. This plan would cost about $1.7 million.

BMS and the current CMS, which share identical building plans, both have a capacity of about 1,200 students, while the old CMS is estimated to have a capacity for about 775. Blackburn said many of the potential costs that could be incurred would come from installing portable classroom units at various schools to accommodate student populations larger than the capacity of the school buildings.

She said some concerns of the school board had been maintaining a high school program separate from the middle school program, ensuring proper parking and transportation arrangements and making sure that cafeterias and classrooms had up-to-date technologies to handle the influx of students.
For these reasons, she said, the use of the old BMS on South Main Street, as well as the use of other non-school facilities such as potential commercial property or space on the Virginia Tech campus was not feasible.

Blackburn will continue to seek comments from the community tomorrow at CMS. She said the public input was important to the school board’s decision.

“If I over-communicate, I’m fine with that, but I don’t want to under-communicate,” she said.

But many of the more than 25 audience members who offered comments at the 7 p.m. meeting Monday felt differently. Speakers were allowed to give three-minute statements on the issue.

Many criticized Blackburn and the Montgomery County School Board in their comments.

Ishwar Puri, engineering science and mechanics department head at Tech, echoed the sentiments of many in his statement that the school board was not focusing on the learning objectives of students. He said he felt it had taken “inclusive leadership” away from the community and that it was not considering the impact that shuffling students would have on their futures, especially their chances in college admissions.

“This is a very grave moment in our community,” Puri said.

Comments also focused on the potential of re-opening the old BMS, the way the current split schedule at BMS was affecting families’ lives, whether middle school or high school students would have a harder time adjusting to a new school and possibly being sent to Christiansburg, and the way in which the school board had dealt with the BHS situation since the initial Feb. 13 gym collapse.

A version of this article appeared in the Jun 24 issue of the Collegiate Times.