Two strikes and you’re out?
Not hardly, Monongalia Schools Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. said Wednesday.
Campbell was talking about the state School Building Authority, and its answer to the local school district the day before.
That was when the authority said no, a second time, to the county’s funding request for a project that would advance the mission of science, technology, engineering and math education — or STEM, as it is known.
The district was asking for a $1.7 million outlay, which it would have matched, for the addition of three new STEM classrooms to the county Technical Education Center on Mississippi Street.
Not just any classrooms, however.
Campbell and the district are envisioning three gleaming classroom-lab spaces for the enhanced study of robotics, pre-engineering and e-gaming.
“These are the fields of the future,” the superintendent said previously.
Instruction at the tech center would be enhanced by marquee, corporate sponsors, Campbell said, in order to outfit those spaces with the latest technology — so students can enter the arena fully checked out on the tools of the trade.
The SBA, which doles the dollars for new buildings and other infrastructure improvements in education across West Virginia’s 55 counties, also gave a nay vote to the proposal last year.
Campbell was pragmatic and philosophical after both calls.
Trouble is, there are only so many of those dollars to go around, the superintendent said.
This go-around, 26 counties put in for projects that collectively totaled more than $160 million.
The authority, however, only had a little more than $40 million to work with, Campbell said.
“Nothing against the SBA,” the superintendent said.
“The projects it did fund involved multiple school buildings in high-need counties. And, like we talked about, there’s only so much money to go around.”
Economically strapped McDowell County was one of them.
Monies from the SBA will be used to consolidate three aging elementary schools into one new building.
Other greenlit projects were already in the middle of multiple commitments from the authority, the superintendent said.
The district has already projected the construction of a stand-alone STEM high school in its current Comprehensive Education Facilities Plan.
Known as the CEFP, that’s a document that public school districts here are required to update every 10 years, as directed by state code.
The current document runs through 2020, and Mon’s district has a good track record of putting envisioned concepts into constructed reality.
A new University High School was the marquee directive of the 2000-10 document, and that happened. The environmentally friendly Eastwood Elementary was the star of the 2010-20 plan, and that happened, too.
Meanwhile, the tech center classrooms would transform the tech center into the middle school equivalent of the as-yet built STEM high school, Campbell said.
Abandoning the project, the superintendent said, would mean officially revamping the comprehensive plan, which would then have to be re-submitted to the state.
“We haven’t sat down, administratively or as a board, to talk about what we’re going to do,” Campbell said.
“That will happen after the new year. We might even talk to the SBA to see what we can do to make the project more attractive. STEM is still our No. 1 priority.”
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