NORFOLK
When it rains, water pours through the windows of classrooms at Maury High.
Lenee Wade, an AP English teacher whose classroom is on the second floor, is used to it. She and many other teachers put up decorations to cover the water stains. This classroom, the second she’s taught in at Maury, actually is an improvement over the first, she said.
“There’s a lot of learning that takes place here, even with all this,” Wade said.
Friday morning, state senators and city officials crowded in front of the chalkboard – like most classrooms at the school, hers doesn’t have a whiteboard – to survey the conditions, part of a two-day tour of schools throughout Hampton Roads organized by a legislators who are studying what to do about aging school facilities throughout Virginia.
Built in 1910, Maury is the third-oldest continuously operating school in Virginia and the oldest high school. The iconic stairs in the front of the building open into a marble-floored lobby that is as stately as the halls of the state Capitol. Beyond the lobby though, its age shows.
There is the auditorium, where a 750-pound section of ceiling collapsed during a band concert a few years back, grazing the shoulder of an audience member. That only one person was hit and that he wasn’t seriously injured was pure luck, Principal Karen Berg said: Days before, a standing-room-only audience of teenagers filled the room.
A floor below, in a room where textbooks are stacked on shelves up to the ceiling, dehumidifiers are emptied three times a day but sheets of plaster peel from the wall like a broken egg shell.
In the back of the school, two 32-gallon trash cans are parked behind caution tape and under a section of the ceiling damaged earlier this month from rain brought by Hurricane Florence. Smaller trash cans sit atop bleachers in the gym to collect water leaking there.
“It’s non-stop,” Berg said.
Maury isn’t an exceptionally decrepit school, legislators reassured school staff. In the Senate Subcommittee on School Facility Modernization’s tours of schools in Southwest Virginia, Southside and even Northern Virginia, they’ve seen the same problems over and over.
“It’s like this everywhere you go,” state Sen. David Marsden, D-Fairfax, said.
At Churchland Middle School, state Sen. Lionell Spruill Sr., D-Chesapeake, said he felt like “a prisoner” in the windowless second-floor that principal Barbara Kimzey described as a “maze.” There, air ducts operate so loudly that Kimzey said she struggled Friday morning to hear a teacher whose lesson she was trying to evaluate.
At Booker T. Washington High, where the heating and air conditioning system is 44 years old – same as the school – lawmakers walking under ceilings dotted by removed tiles turned up their noses at the musty smell.
“You can feel the humidity,” state Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, said.
Stanley, chairman of the subcommittee, has proposed a sweeping change to the way the state funds school construction needs, which it currently doesn’t do. Instead, the costs are fronted by localities on top of the money they’re required to contribute to operating schools.
A 2017 Supreme Court decision opens the door to states collecting sales tax from online purchases, a move estimated to produce $300 million or more a year. That money was slated to go to transportation needs, but Stanley wants to split the pot, with half for school construction.
Bonds issued by the state with that money could raise $3 to $4 billion, he estimates.
“We can fix these schools now, not a little bit at a time here and there,” Stanley said.
School and city leaders across Hampton Roads have said they’re desperate for the help. City managers in Norfolk and Portsmouth say they’ve tried to be creative but their localities are just tapped out, with huge swaths of the cities’ properties off the tax rolls and debt capacity maxed out. Even if they were to raise taxes, the amount they could generate wouldn’t be enough, Portsmouth’s Lydia Pettis-Patton said.
“The state has to help,” she said.
Farrell Hanzaker, the chief financial officer for Virginia Beach schools, echoed the concern. The city has “done all they can do,” he told legislators.
Stanley’s group will meet once more in October to start drafting legislation for the 2019 session. The challenge, he said, will be convincing legislators in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to give up transportation money that would likely otherwise be headed their way.
“We’re talking about trying to make someone’s commute five minutes faster or saving a child from the cycle of poverty,” Stanley said. “I think the decision is easy.”
Sara Gregory, 757-222-5150, sara.gregory@pilotonline.com
