By: Dr. Darron Arlt - PHS Superintendent
Upon further inspection and reflection, I’ve been trying to look at every inch of space throughout our campus through the lens of a student, teacher, guest, or prospective teacher who tours our building.
This comes on the heels of being turned down for the 3rd time by a prospective Industrial Arts/Shop teacher in the past 12 months. We are not very proud to show off our shop classroom and drafting room to interviewees.
The wood working lab, while complete with some modern woodworking and cabinet making machines, is undersized and dingy at best. The classroom is original from 1956. This is the same for the vocal and instrumental music room.
While in the neighborhood of the music room, I wandered down to the “dungeon” locker rooms underneath the stage. They were built in 1949 along with the tartan gym. They look just about the same as they did in 1949 with community showers and open sinks and toilets.
I feel compelled to apologize to our guests who I escort down there when they arrive for games.
Across the street, I routinely find our ESU staff in makeshift closets, “cubby rooms”, available tables in the library, or Mrs. Hodson’s office when she’s not there.
When the Elementary school was built 60 years ago, student services such as speech, OT/PT, SAT, psychological and mental health, and physical health were either not as necessary or not required by law. I recall when I was in elementary school in the 1970’s, our special needs students were served in the trailer behind the school and generally spent their entire day segregated from their general ed. peers.
Times, and how all students are served, has changed dramatically but our school building hasn’t. We would love to offer a 3-year old preschool program, as well as a staff and/or community daycare at school but we simply do not have the facility space to do so.
Looking into our future, projected enrollment is a key component to considering an investment in facilities.
Just over 10 years ago during the 5-school study, an enrollment projection was done for Plainview Public Schools. Whoever was tasked with that prediction was in over their head because he/she suggested our enrollment for this past school year would be 212. We were 366. We expect an enrollment well over 300 for many, many years to come. We currently serve 30+ kindergarteners for example.
With the dedicated staff we have and leadership in place committed to our future, in addition to an ambitious modern facility project, we could likely expect families to be attracted to Plainview for many reasons with our public school foremost among them!
To conclude, avid readers of the Plainview News would have noticed that I fumbled my simple math calculation last week. 2025 minus 1920 is 105, not 125. Good work Rich, with that Osmond HS education, spotting that error!