No Time to Rest On School Laurels...

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School bells across Moore County should be ringing in celebration today. According to the latest test scores and other statistical measures, our public schools have taken their place among North Carolina’s academic elite.

The results are a tribute to teachers, principals, administrative staffers, parents and students. This should strengthen our resolve to make a good school system even better.

Schools Superintendent Patrick Russo announced Monday that our system ranked 27th in North Carolina over a four-year period ending with the 1999-2000 school year. And when the 1999-2000 data are considered alone, Moore ranks a heady 13th among the state’s 117 school systems. Moore has rapidly catapulted from the middle of the achievement pack. As recently as 1998-99, we ranked 44th.

The ranking system was conceived locally and agreed upon four years ago by the Moore County Board of Education and the Moore County Board of Commissioners. The ranking is derived from Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, the dropout rate, the percent of students who showed proficiency on standardized state tests and the percent of schools that achieved expected or exemplary improvement in reading, math and writing according to the state Department of Public Instruction’s ABC’s accountability standards.

The standards adopted by the school board and commissioners was the measuring stick for an improvement plan whose goal was to put Moore County in the state’s top 10 percent by next year. The school board later abandoned that objective, contending that the commissioners weren’t providing schools with enough financial support meet the goal.

Even so, the rankings show that our schools are on schedule to move into the top 10 percent next year. It would be a mistake for the commissioners to use the rankings as an excuse to continue to underfund the schools on the assumption that the scores show that schools are getting the money they need. Instead, the commissioners should make an increased investment in this county’s schools.

The rankings are a mixed blessing. They will heighten local expectations of our schools. If they don’t perform as well next year, that will be interpreted in some quarters as failure. But our students and teachers have come to expect much of themselves, and rightly so. After all, this is Moore County, and we can do even better. Now is the time for elected officials and the community at large to join forces and help lead our schools onward and upward.

...Go With Tech Plan

A key component of the effort to make schools in Moore County even better is improvement of their technological capability. That carries a hefty price tag that can be met with a combination of public and private funding.

On Monday, a broadly based advisory panel submitted to the school board an $18.4 million, three-year plan to put more computers in classrooms, broaden student and teacher access to the Internet and train teachers to use technology in instruction. The set of recommendations is the product of eight months of work by the technology committee.

The technology committee and the schools aren’t asking the Moore County commissioners to fully fund the plan with tax dollars. That would mean a 13-cent property tax hike. The commissioners should appropriate a substantial amount, but other sources of funding should be found. Among the possibilities are state and federal grants and donations by private philanthropic foundations.

Our schools have to move technologically into the 21st century. Computers have become essential to the teaching of core academic skills. Moreover, the job market now requires computer skills for even some of the most basic occupations. More and more colleges are requiring that entering freshmen arrive on campus with computers.