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Official: Change role of new school
By ROBERT KING Sales taxes to build the new high school have been rolling into cash registers for nearly three years. We've known who the principal would be for about a year and half; and what courses would be offered for even longer than that. Six months ago, workers begin laying the foundation. By now, parts of the second floor are coming together. You can even start to make out the shape of the school's front entrance. But with only 18 months to go until the school is due to open, School Board chairman Jim Malcolm wants to rethink the purpose of Hernando County's $39-million high school. Malcolm said he is willing to throw out key elements of the school's design -- the yet-to-be-built gymnasium and athletic fields among them -- to create a greater emphasis on technical training. In fact, Malcolm says the board should rethink whether the new school should be a high school at all. He would prefer that it be a technical training center that high school students would use on a part-time basis while taking their academic courses elsewhere. Malcolm, who dropped his bombshell of an idea at a board workshop last week, admits that he's got only six months at the most to alter the school's destiny. And some would argue he's got less time than that. But the stubborn, sometimes eccentric, Malcolm is undeterred. "Let's step outside of the box," he said. "It's not too late to do that." Malcolm said he has been trying for two years to get a greater technical emphasis brought to plans for the new high school. But he said then-Superintendent John Sanders resisted his efforts. With Sanders gone, he expects new Superintendent Wendy Tellone to be more open to allowing her staff to research his idea. The issue arose last week when the School Board was asked to set aside $350,000 from its small construction project budget for a physical education building at the new school. Malcolm opposed the request and promptly launched into his push for a purer vocational mission for the high school. Specifically, Malcolm is enamored with the framework of a Daytona Beach technical school shared by high school students from Volusia and Flagler counties. Malcolm said students take career-related courses at the technical center but get academic courses and extracurricular activities -- such as sports -- at their home school. That's contrary to the very fabric of Hernando County's new school, which will be called Nature Coast Technical High School. Educators have envisioned it as place that offers both academic and vocational courses under one roof. More than that, the line between academic and vocational will, in many cases, be blurred. Writing assignments and history lessons will be tailored to suit the student's career. And Nature Coast would have its own band and athletic teams, already dubbed the Sharks. Tizzy Schoelles, already tabbed as Nature Coast Tech's first principal, said Malcolm's idea would be a radical change from the concept district officials gave her when she took the job. What's more, she says, the school is designed to have more than 24 academics-only classrooms that would be obsolete in a vocational-only school. Malcolm's doubts, just two months before she outlines her plans to get the school up and running, make her feel "a little insecure." "It concerns me that we have a major stakeholder in Mr. Malcolm who is on a much different page," Schoelles said. Still, other board members still envision the school that Schoelles is planning. And they haven't hesitated to poke holes in Malcolm's idea. John Druzbick and Sandra Nicholson are, besides Malcolm, the only board members who were in office when Hernando voters approved a half-percent sales to pay for the school in 1998. Both question how a school like Malcolm envisions would draw enough students to relieve overcrowding at the county's three existing high schools. And both point out that Malcolm is promoting a school different from what was pitched to voters -- a full-service high school that would emphasize vocational and technical training while also serving college-bound students. "I told everybody this would be a comprehensive school," said Druzbick, the board chairman in 1998 and leader of the sales tax campaign. Malcolm doesn't remember it that way. "My emphasis has always been very strongly on the vocational-technical aspect," Malcolm said. "That's what we were selling and frankly that's what I think the people were voting for." -- Times staff writer Robert King covers education in Hernando County and can be reached at 754-6127. Send e-mail to rking@sptimes.com.
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