The DeKalb County Board of Education has scheduled a workshop for Monday, April 4th at 6:00 p.m. at DCHS to discuss plans for addressing science needs at the high school.
Fifth district member W.J. (Dub) Evins, III, during Thursday night’s monthly school board meeting, said the science labs at the school haven’t been updated in many years and its time for the board to act. “We want to do this right. Its going to take some time. If the county mayor and county commission deem this to be appropriate to amend our budget for this year then hopefully we can get started on this and have something done and completed through the summer months so that the classes coming back in 2011-12 can take advantage of this,” said Evins.
“We have students leave this school and go to college. Some of them do okay in physics and chemistry. Some of them struggle with it. But its not because of the teachers. We have some teachers who are capable of teaching in any school but they need the facilities to work with and we’re not providing that. We need to get with the program, meet, and then ask for a budget amendment. This may even involve having a portable classroom for the actual class and turning that into a full fledged lab. We need to do what’s needed. If we’re going to just take a band aid approach we might as well not do anything. If we can do it and do it right, that’s great. Its not going to be money wasted because if we have a long range plan of five years or more for a new high school and it be the wishes of the board and community that (existing high school building) be turned into a middle school, then what better opportunity could the (future) middle school students have than to have a chemistry, physics, biology, and science lab? That would be a blessing,” said Evins.