Hello West Springfield Community,
Both Springfield School Board candidates Elizabeth Schultz and John Wittman attended the Springfield School Board candidate forum hosted by the West Springfield High School PTSA on Monday October 3 at WSHS.
In addition to a wide variety of educational issue questions, we asked each candidate what specifically they would do if elected to accelerate the pace of school renovations given that WSHS is not projected to be fully renovated until 2019.
Wittman stated he did not believe current CIP funding is sufficient for all the FCPS school assets. He described himself as a consensus builder who pledged to work together with both the Board of Supervisors and the School Board to try to increase CIP funding via increased bonding.
Wittman also thinks FCPS should implement a “design build” approach for high school renovations because renovation projects could be completed quicker while FCPS could still maintain design specification control.
Schultz also favors implementing design build planning to accelerate renovations and also believes that more investment needs to be made in the CIP. But she does not support increasing CIP budgets via more funding from the Board of Supervisors. Instead, she advocates pursuing potential new private sector and federal and state funding sources to complement existing CIP funding.
Schultz believes Fairfax should seek new private sector funding sources including public/private partnerships. She mentioned that she is already proactively meeting with private sector leaders including Gary Jones, Youth for Tomorrow CEO and former FCPS School Board member, to “innovate on ideas” to identify new ideas, approaches and revenue streams to accelerate school renovations.
Schultz also stated that leveraging historical preservation organizations including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Preservation Virginia can provide an additional funding source to renovate older schools.
Also, here are results of the SOAR candidate survey to Chairman, Springfield and Braddock District Board of Supervisors and candidates, School Board candidates and also At Large School Board candidates to assess candidates’ awareness of and positions on the WSHS facility issue.
We asked the following Yes/No questions:
1. Do you support the 2011 School Bond?
2. Are you familiar with the present FCPS timeline to fully renovate West Springfield High School no earlier than 2019?
3. Do you support increasing the capital budget to take advantage of low cost of money and improved construction costs?
4. As an elected official, can the West Springfield High School community count on your support to accelerate the renovation on or before its 50th anniversary in 2016?
5. Do you support creative ways to help renovate schools?
6. Would you be willing to visit West Springfield High School prior to the election to see the condition students, faculty and administrative staff encounter every day?
We received the following candidate responses who all answered “yes” to all questions:
Pat Herrity – Springfield Board of Supervisors
John Cook – Braddock Board of Supervisors
Sharon Bulova – Chairman, Board of Supervisors
John Wittman & Elizabeth Schultz – Candidates, Springfield School Board
Nell Hurley – Candidate, Braddock School Board
Candidates, School Board At Large:
o Sheree Brown-Kaplan
o Lolita Mancheno-Smoak
o Ryan McElveen
o Ilryong Moon
o Steve Stuban
o Ted Velkoff
Pat Herrity, John Cook, John Wittman, Elizabeth Schultz, Nell Hurley, Sheree Brown-Kaplan and Steve Stuban provided additional comments, positions and thoughts on the CIP and the West Springfield High School facility issue. We’ve included all this feedback on the front page of our website -
http://www.soarwestspringfield.com/
We received no reply from the following candidates:
· Janet Oleszek – Candidate, Braddock Board of Supervisors
· Spike Williams – Candidate, Chairman Board of Supervisors
· Megan McLaughlin – Candidate, Braddock School Board
We were unable to contact At Large School Board candidate Lin-Dai Kendall because there is no email address listed on her campaign website.
Check out our website for more details on candidate responses to our survey.
SOAR West Springfield
http://www.soarwestspringfield.com/