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on how we can economize.” He maintained that the administration and School Board must work with the supervisors to “make the machine fit the chassis, to make our school system fit the county.”
“If the drop in enrollment fell in one neat little package — in the fourth grade or in the seventh grade or in one level of high school English — it would be easier,” said School Board Chairman Beverly Massie. “But it doesn’t, and we have state mandates, the standards of quality that we must meet.
“We understand that there’s been a drop in school population right now but unfortunately, we do not have the leeway from the state (to correspondingly reduce the teaching staff),” Mrs. Massie said.
Superintendent Robert Estabrook agreed that a student/teacher ratio of 14:1 or even 18:1 is “almost optimal” but maintained that the figures cited by Mr. Miller — reached by dividing total number of teachers into total number of students — present a distorted picture of class size at both schools. He pointed out that special education classes are, in some cases, limited to a maximum of six students while advanced classes at the high school, such as physics, chemistry and calculus, have enrollments almost that small.
He acknowledged that there’s “a limit to what Rappahannock County taxpayers can absorb” but maintained that declining federal contri
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