The Carroll County school board voted yesterday to push back by a year the planned construction date for a $26 million middle school in South Carroll while school planners re-evaluate enrollment projections.
School officials hope that delaying construction of the school until at least 2007 and gaining another year of enrollment data to study will prevent the county from building a school that could open half-full.
In approving the district's 10-year blueprint for school construction and renovation projects, the board also agreed to accelerate plans for the renovations of three aging elementary schools.
The schedule now calls for renovation to begin at Freedom, William Winchester and Charles Carroll elementary schools in fiscal years 2007, 2008 and 2009, respectively, with construction lasting two years at each school.
But the renovation plan, combined with construction of a fine arts addition and a full modernization of South Carroll High School - pushed back six years by the board yesterday to fiscal year 2011 -is not affordable, county budget director Ted Zaleski warned board members.
"The money just isn't there to do four modernizations in four years," he said.
Despite Zaleski's admonition, school board President Susan G. Holt and members Thomas G. Hiltz and Laura K. Rhodes approved the facilities master plan with the successive renovation projects in the schedule. Board members Gary W. Bauer and C. Scott Stone did not attend yesterday's meeting.
Holt emphasized that the board is not backing away from the new South Carroll middle school by pushing construction of the project to the fiscal year that begins in July 2007. Rather, she wants county school planners to study the next two years' worth of enrollment estimates to determine whether classroom crowding is tapering off or whether this year's projections are a fluke.
Based on the school district's formula for the four existing schools that the state would consider before approving plans for a new South Carroll middle, enrollment projections for Mount Airy, New Windsor, Oklahoma Road and Sykesville middle schools show 479 more pupils than the schools have room for in 2005, when county officials would submit plans for the new school.
But projections for the four schools in September 2008 show that student enrollment would have declined during the three years the new school was being planned and built. Estimates calculated this spring indicate that the area middle schools would be 399 pupils over capacity in September 2008, down 80 pupils from projections for 2005.
It "is very difficult to justify this school," facilities director Raymond Prokop told board members of the new South Carroll middle school.
Pointing out that enrollment estimates indicate that the new building would be 50 percent to 60 percent full the year it opened, he added, "We want to take one more year of enrollment data to see what it tells us."
In other business, the board approved raises for school administrators whose salaries, according to a school system analysis, trailed their counterparts in similarly sized Maryland school districts.
The Carroll school system will spend $150,000 over three years to upgrade the pay of 78 employees working as elementary, middle and high school assistant principals and elementary and middle school principals.
Salaries for assistant principals in Carroll schools range from $51,993 for a rookie elementary or middle school administrator to $68,789 for a high school administrator at top scale.
Carroll Superintendent Charles I. Ecker said he chose not to upgrade the salaries of high school principals because they ranked more favorably among the other counties - fourth for a rookie principal paid $70,928 and fifth for a top-scale administrator paid $87,232.
