Do our two new Trustees recommend building a fourth Senior High school?

Short answer: No.

Slightly longer answer: In the campaign running up to the May 2011 election, both David Stolle and Mike Friedman said  "No" to a fourth Senior High school.

Complete answer: A full transcript for the April 14th, 2011, Key Communicators Forum follows.  I report, you read, and then you decide.

Source - http://pisdtv.pisd.edu/communications/features/EufT1YIXvCWi9AnpVLL0 

Time - Approx. 50:00

Question:

Do you believe that the large class size at the Senior High schools is affecting the quality of education?  Would you consider building another Senior High school?  Why, or why not?


Friedman

We're broke.  Again, and I do not believe we should be looking at spending money on another High school. 

I think we have a lot of inefficiencies in the PISD school district.  We have a lot of schools that are under-served.  We need to go back and do an analysis on all the schools and see if we can fit students in one school or another.  We might have to close a school, possibly, and put students in, uh, or fill up other schools and then bring high schoolers back into the school that we closed down. 

So I think that we need to utilize every square foot we have currently in the PISD and absolutely not get more debt in this next two or three years.


Stolle

Paul's in the classroom right now.  I've been in the classroom, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that class size matters.  And, when you have a large class, it is much more difficult to teach. 

In a perfect world, yes, we would build another high school.  We have, I think, three of the six largest graduating classes in the state of Texas.  Our district is based on an economy of scale, so we have large classes.  We expect that. 

But I believe we're at the point that we could use another high school.  However, reality is that that high school is at least 10 years away, if not longer. 

So, as a Trustee, we can start now with planning that, planning for another new high school.  But it's not coming any time soon.

What we can do, however, is what the board started to do with an academy.  We can build academies throughout town.  However, before we start with one academy, we need to make sure we know where we're going, and that we have a plan so that we're able to use those academies successfully and efficiently.