By Karen Hall

Editor

If you tour Marshall County schools, everything looks great at first. Halls are clean and brightly decorated, students are moving from room to room in an orderly fashion, teachers are friendly and enjoying their jobs.

Start opening some doors, however, and you see a different picture.

Eight or 10 outside agencies, like the Department of Human Services, Centerstone, Child Protective Services, and law enforcement, visit CHES on a regular basis, said Principal Dean Delk.

"There's no place for them to go," he said. "We don't have adequate space to provide services for our children."

If there are no sick children, agency representatives can use the nurse's room. Otherwise, Delk or Assistant Principal Dawn Kirby have to vacate their offices.

Teachers' work areas at Chapel Hill Elementary have been turned into small classrooms. The work areas each have a restroom, and these are still for teachers' use, but to use them, they have to walk through a class in progress. Another teachers' work area had been turned iinto a room for the Instructional Facilitator and her assistant, but it has to do double duty as a testing room.

English as a Second Language and Speech teachers share the Comprehensive Development Classroom with 11 CDC students and their teacher and aides.

Ninety students who get special help with reading skills through federal Title funding go 10 at at time to a room that used to be a break room for teachers' assistants.

"They do a great job in here," said Delk.

The bookkeeper is squeezed into a windowless technology room, and teachers eat lunch and relax in janitors' closets.

Worse still, there is no storage space. Boxes of books, papers, and teaching tools are crammed into every available nook and cranny. The portable units at CHES, no longer safe to use as classrooms, were being used for storage, but one of those has been lost to fire, with all its contents.

"It's unreal what they get done," said Delk, praising his staff. "They never complain."

A new intermediate school at Chapel Hill, built on land adjacent to CHES that the county already owns, would alleviate crowding at both the elementary school and at Forrest, allowing for at least 10 years of growth.

At Forrest, the five lunch sittings in the cafeteria start at 10:30 a.m. With the sixth graders moved to intermediate school, Assistant Principal Davy McClaran said, lunch could start at 11 a.m. and they would only need four sittings.

"We really are limited with classrooms for growth," he said.

Turn a couple of corners from the entranceway at Forrest and you are in the oldest part of the school -- where the business lab and chemistry lab smell of mold no matter how much the teachers and janitors clean them -- on the way to the "old gym." What Schools Director Jackie Abernathy recently told school board members is true: you can stand in the middle of the floor and see daylight under the eaves all the way around. Stains mark where water trickles down the walls during a heavy rain, and trash cans are strategically placed to catch water dripping through the room.

Elementary schools in Lewisburg are in better shape physically than the oldest part of Forrest, but they are as crowded as CHES. Marshall Elementary has a really small playroom, and its stage is merely a raised platform, with no curtain or wings. Westhills has a good stage, with a real curtain, but the area behind the curtain is being used for storage. Putting on a theatrical production means finding another place to put all the stored items, as well as temporarily evicting ESL from one of the wings and music instruction from the other.

The schools were designed with storage rooms attached to classrooms, but, with tables and chairs installed, store rooms now double as teaching areas for children who need one-on-one help with speech, for instance.

Teachers and principals are accustomed to making do and putting a brave face on it, Abernathy said, but if overcrowding is not alleviated now by a sensible building program, it will only be more expensive and more difficult to fix a few years down the road.