The vision
for Isle of Wight County Schools is to create a learning environment that
enables every child to discover his or her unique gifts and talents. The
mission is to enhance and expand on each child’s unique gifts and talents to
ensure every child is college, career, and life ready. For this vision and
mission to come alive in Isle of Wight County, it requires commitment from the
School Board, school leaders, and all school staff. Another important group
that may not always be acknowledged is the community. The community
of stakeholders is made up of taxpayers both parents and citizens without
children, business partners, and the Board of Supervisors. The old adage of “It takes a village” has
never been more important in these very divisive times. We are fortunate to have
two boards that have come together to look out for the interest of Isle of
Wight County, first and foremost.
Our future
is based on strong economic growth, which is not possible without a strong,
viable workforce. The Board of Supervisors (BOS) understands this more than any
governing body that I have worked with before. For the budget proposed during
my first year, we focused on the condition of our facilities and added line
items to ensure infrastructure upgrades and schedules for furniture, playground
and bus replacement, as well as cycles for painting and paving at all schools.
The BOS funded an increase of $736,000 to meet these very important needs that
had been neglected for too long. In year two, our school board and I agreed
that we should try to meet the school needs while trying to be fiscally
responsible and only ask when funds were needed. We were able to improve our teachers scale
without asking the county for any increase in local dollars. The BOS did fund
an additional 2.7 million dollars in the Capital Improvement Budget to replace
roofs at Carrsville, Carrollton, and Windsor Elementary school. In addition
they agreed to take on the debt service for our new Career and Technical
Education project that includes programs such as welding, agricultural sciences
on the land lab, building trades, mechatronics, nursing, culinary arts,
cosmetology, and global logistics.
This year, with
increased enrollment, we met challenges in class size at the high school level that
were not expected. Once again the BOS worked cooperatively with our Board to
fund additional positions at SHS. The proposed budget for 2018-2019 had
requests from several schools that would reduce class size and continue the
quality education everyone has come accustomed to. The request was large--$1,094,000. School Board
members met and publicly shared the reasons behind the requests. The number of community
members who came out to provide public input was more than I had ever seen. The speakers were polite and stated their
reasons for supporting the budget in a thoughtful and respectful manner. It was encouraging to see. The Supervisors
came through once again by fully funding the schools operating request. They also fully funded the Capital
Improvement Plan (CIP) requests to replace the HVAC at SHS (at a cost of $1.97
million over two years).
In my three
years with IWCS, the Board of Supervisors have shown a willingness to work with
the School Board to continue, and to even expand, the services provided to our
students. They understand that their
investment in the youngest citizens of Isle of Wight County will pay dividends
for all stakeholders in the long run.
