At least one Isle of Wight County School Board member, and one supervisor, aren’t in favor of locating Westside Elementary’s replacement directly opposite Turner Drive from the existing Smithfield High School and Smithfield Middle School complex.

Replacing the 1960s-era Westside on West Main Street, listed as the School Board’s No. 2 priority behind in-progress school security upgrades, is tentatively scheduled to start during the 2025-26 school year. It was estimated as of November 2023 to cost $71 million but is budgeted at $50 million over the next two fiscal years in the county’s adopted 2024-25 budget and 10-year capital improvement plan.

“One thing I would not like to see is building another school on Turner Drive,” School Board member John Collick said at an Oct. 8 joint meeting of the School Board and county supervisors, contending the more than 150-square-mile attendance zone for the current Westside, Smithfield Middle and Smithfield High is resulting in school bus rides lasting more than an hour. Deputy Superintendent Susan Goetz confirmed some students are indeed spending an hour or more on school buses.

“We need to find a good location for it and keep in mind the amount of time our students would be on a school bus, so we can put it strategically somewhere to minimize the amount of time students are on a bus,” Collick said.

Though a 2029 traffic master plan proposing a roundabout on Turner Drive calls for the replacement Westside to be located across the street from the existing middle school and high school complex, Supervisor Renee Rountree said she too believes that “having another school on that site would probably make things worse.”

Rountree maintains the roundabout, even without the replacement Westside, would still be needed for the benefit of proposed commercial development at Turner’s intersection with Benns Church Boulevard.

Goetz said the plans for a replacement Westside date to 2018 when a stakeholder committee looking at growth and school capacity proposed building a new preschool-through-grade-4 Hardy Elementary, which was completed in 2023, and replacing the grades 4-6 Westside with a new middle school that would house grades 5-7. The existing grades 7-8 Smithfield Middle School, which, according to Isle of Wight County Schools’ latest projections, will be at 95.75% of its capacity by the buildout of five in-progress housing developments, would become a grades 8-9 junior high school and Smithfield High would become grades 10-12.

That plan was contingent on Carrollton Elementary, which currently houses preschool through third grade, absorbing the fourth-graders who now attend Westside. That’s no longer feasible, Goetz said. Enrollment data as of Sept. 30 showed Carrollton at 78% of its capacity just with preschool through third grade.

The capacity figures refer to program capacity rather than building capacity. Program capacity is constrained by state standards regarding class size. For example, a preschool classroom is required to have 18 or fewer students, while the same room, were it to house third grade, could have up to 24 students. Goetz said the division has seen an influx of students with multiple disabilities requiring self-contained special education classrooms, which are capped at eight students.

 

What are the options?

If a new school isn’t built on Turner Drive or elsewhere, one option is to redraw the division’s attendance zones so that more students who live in the northern end of the county would attend the less-populous Georgie D. Tyler Middle School and Windsor High School roughly 15 miles south of Smithfield, which presently serve the central and southern end of the county.

But that would mean even longer bus routes for some students, and in some cases buses driving past Smithfield High to take students to Windsor High, Goetz said.

Supervisor William McCarty contends the cost of building a new school, regardless of where it’s located, would likely require a 9-cent increase on the county’s real estate tax rate, which currently is 73 cents per $100 in assessed value. Smithfield and Windsor residents pay an additional 16 cents and 15 cents per $100, respectively, to their towns.

County Administrator Randy Keaton said the county had initially envisioned a 4-cent real estate tax increase to pay back the more than $30 million borrowed for Hardy, but said the county was able to fund the school without a tax increase due to saving roughly $6 million by refinancing existing debt and borrowing for Hardy at interest rates lower than they are today. 

While IWCS projects Smithfield Middle School will be at 106% of its program capacity by the time seven additional approved but unbuilt developments build out, McCarty contends some “may never come online.”

McCarty said he had knowledge of one approved but unbuilt development proposing to reduce its impacts by two-thirds, but would not name which of the seven.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Joel Acree also suggested a voter referendum on whether to raise real estate taxes to pay for new schools, though Keaton said it would have to be a non-binding advisory referendum.

Isle of Wight has also lobbied over the past three years for legislation that would allow the county to raise its sales tax by 1% by binding voter referendum to pay for new schools, but each year, the legislation has stalled. During the 2024 General Assembly session, the state House and Senate each passed their respective sales tax bills with two-thirds bipartisan majorities but Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed both bills, and both chambers declined to override his veto. Isle of Wight has included the legislation in its 2025 list of legislative priorities.