White Co. Considers School Closure To Fund SROs

The White County School System will consider closing Central View Elementary School in order to place school resource officers at each school across the county.

Director of Schools Kurt Dronebarger said it’s a hard decision, but something that needs to be done.

“I told the board last night, that there’s nothing in my heart that wants to close Central View, but as CEO of this school system there’s nothing in my brain that tells me it makes sense to keep spending that amount of money when we can get the same product and make our students safer by moving these students to a few other schools,” Dronebarger said.

Closing Central View would save the school system some $1.2 million and Dronebarger estimates a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars to fund SROs in each school.

“This idea of closing the school has been alive probably for over 10 or 12 years,” Dronebarger said. “We’ve watched as the enrollment has gone down over the years and the discussion has been brought up several times.”

Under Dronebarger’s proposal, the 72 students at Central View would be rezoned to three other schools no more than 7 miles away. No layoffs would occur as each teacher would be absorbed into vacancies that come up within the school system.

“With the natural attrition of the year and the amount of retirements that we have, we are able to absorb all of those teacher positions,” Dronebarger said. “We will bring those people on even if we don’t have those vacancies.”

Dronebarger said recent discussions about closing the school began about a month ago when Senator Paul Bailey invited several school officials from across the region to a school safety discussion at Tennessee Tech.

Bailey served on Governor Bill Haslam’s school safety work group, which was recently tasked to come up with ways to improve school safety statewide. Haslam took the recommendations and proposed a $30 million school safety plan that included a call for SROs in all schools across the state.

“Most of that is not reoccurring money and what we found…is that schools across Tennessee just have different needs. Many schools already have SROs, some need security cameras, and some need secure vestibules,” Dronebarger said. “They’re just kind of throwing money at the districts and saying do the best you can. We have a lot of cameras and vestibules, but we need SROs in White County.”

The school system will hold a town hall meeting at Central View Elementary later this month to give residents an opportunity to voice opinions and express their concerns.

That meeting is scheduled for April 26th at 6:00 p.m. The board won’t be voting on the closure of the school until the May meeting.