Last week this column remarked on how the St. Mary’s County Public School System increased the size of its elementary schools without any public discussion, input from the public, or vote by the Board of Education. This week the Board held a special meeting to approve the School System’s modified capital budget, which included three new, overrsized 645 student elementary schools.

If there ever was a time to have the discussion and debate about increasing the size of our elementary schools, this was it. The School System was asking for an adjustment in the budget. The Board of Education must approve the budget before it can be executed. There is no law which would prevent the Board of Education from exercising its powers and requiring the School System to explain how the children in the St. Mary’s County elementary schools will benefit from the change in school size. Then the public could have been allowed to comment on the School System’s presentation. Did that happen?

No. Instead the Board of Education ensured that the public would not be able to comment by discussing this topic at an “emergency” meeting, thereby excluding public comment because their policy only allows the “emergency” to be discussed at an “emergency meeting.”

1. The Leonardtown School District is now over even the very generous 107% of State capacity established by the McKay Board of County Commissioners. Reaching 107% triggers a respite in development until the schools can catch up. Catching up, by the way, is as simple as obtaining planning approval for a school in the area where development is on hold.

2. By renovating Leonardtown and still seeking planning approval from the State for the enlarged new elementary school, the Board of Education should be able to obtain planning approval by next fall for enough seats to alleviate the respite in development, thereby allowing development to continue, even though there are no new seats, nor are any expected until 2007.

3. Chief Administrative Officer Brad Clements expressed his goal by saying, “This will allow us to make APF.” By this he meant that the School System’s capital budget would remove the development respite now in place in Leonardtown and allow the splitting of big pieces of land into smaller pieces of land (building lots) to resume.

4. School Size, School Climate, and Student Performance, by Kathleen Colton, is a publication of the NW Regional Educational Laboratory, a reputable non-profit organization funded by the U. S. Department of Education. This publication reviews 105 studies completed in the 15 years prior to its publication in 1996. Those 105 studies relate to school size. The conclusion of the publication is simple. “Smaller is Better.” The author notes, “We who have become convinced of the superiority of small schools have, as our next challenge, the task of communicating our findings to those who have the power to influence decisions about the size of our schools.” They obviously haven’t reached the members of the St. Mary’s County Board of Education yet.

5. This same study concludes that Schools Within A School (SWAS) data “must be regarded as tentative.” This SWAS method is how the School System intends to make you and me believe that the 645 student elementary school is “more acceptable.” Those 645 student schools can be be expected to have more truancy, more discipline problems, and more violence than small schools according to Colton. Aren't these the very matters task forces for the School system have been discussing over the last two years?

Note that there has been no attempt to pretend the larger schools are better. Even the St. Mary’s County Public School System, with its history of putting the correct spin on bad news, is not willing to try to prove that larger schools are better.

With the approval of this capital budget by the St. Mary’s County Board of Education, the needs of our public school students have once again taken a back seat to the needs of developers. This time, it was the Board of Education, the very group charged with advocating for students, who relegated student needs to a lower priority than devopment of lots. This time they can’t claim that it was a cumbersome network of laws that caused them to be “"unable to made (sic) decisions which make sense to most logically thinking citizens.” This time, the Board of Education freely chose to put the needs of students in second place behind the needs of the adult developers. Is that what you elected them to do?