What Next? Food for Thought

What to do now? I don't have the magic answer, but here are some of my thoughts. If you agree, join me in suggesting these ideas to School Board members, County Commissioners, and General Assembly members. I think it will take a combination of options, but that Wake's immediate growth "crisis" can be handled without drastic actions. Consider:

**Ask our General Assembly members to grant a temporary waiver on class size restrictions. Unless I'm missing something, this would be a quick way to provide some seats for '07-'08 until new schools can be built. Urge County Commissioners and the School Board to press for this as well.

**Keep mobile units/modulars at schools where they are currently housing students. Why move them and decrease capacity at those schools?

**Teachers, don't hate me for this one - remember, I'm still one of you at heart! Increase the number of "mobile" (as in using a cart to travel from class to class) art and music classes. Use their rooms for regular classrooms. Not a happy thought, but it does work, and is already the case now in many schools. At the Committee of the Whole BOE meeting this week, Chuck Dulaney offered the following insight. He said, according to the notes I jotted down, that 20+ students at each of Wake County's elementary schools would have seats if art and music teachers were mobile. At schools where art and music teachers each have a room, it seems like it would free up more than 20 seats, but that's just my limited brain power at work. Of course, that would only need to happen at schools that needed the extra space.

I'll add more ideas as they come to me, but these three are do-able short-term and low on the disruption scale.

I will suggest today to the Wake County School Board that they instruct the Administration to study these and see how many of the 4,500 seats (their number keeps changing) this would take care of.