By Jody Stewart
Tuesday night in front of a large crowd the Chambers County Board of Education held a meeting at the Alfa building to discuss school consolidation with the public. Casey Chambley Chambers County School Superintendent opened the meeting greeting everyone.
Superintendent Chambley brought a different approach to the floor from previous meetings held on the subject. Casey Chambley said, “We are here to offer a full solution to go across the entire landscape of our buildings including elementary, middle, high school everything. We have come here with lots of options across all the buildings across the county. This is hard stuff to talk about. It is hard to talk about closing and combing schools.”
Chambley went on to say that the Board of Education was not making these decisions on their own and they have hired experts and developed a local team of people to represent everyone and to become subject experts.
Chambley then introduced Tracy Ricker who was hired to come in and help the county build a facilities plan. Ricker said, “A decision needs to be made about a facilities plan before any other decision can be made.”
Ricker showed a powerful PowerPoint showing how much it cost the county to run the current schools at low student capacity rates and showed where up to millions could be saved by combining schools. “At some point hard decisions have to be made and if decisions are not made they will just happen on their own because buildings age.”
The crowd was shown four options for elementary schools and three options for middle schools and up. The crowd stayed in attendance for over three hours where they heard Chambley speak along with some experts from hired firms and then the crowd broke into groups and had the opportunity to discuss their concerns and give their options to the local group of subject experts on what they felt was best for the entire community.
Chambley said, “We need to take the first step to get the ball rolling. I hope we make it as soon as possible because the longer we wait we are wasting money, our kids are not getting any younger and our buildings are not getting any younger. All the children across Chambers County deserve the best education.”