Lavaca County small schools going through changes

BOBBY HORECKA, MANAGING EDITOR

BOBBYHORECKA@GMAIL.COM

 

It appears that all three of Lavaca

County’s smallest and most rural school

districts will face some tough choices in

coming weeks.

At Ezzell ISD, school board members

chose last week to await word from one

more group of people before they decide if

they become the first of the county’s three

country schools to add new high school

classes to the current course offerings in

the coming school year.

That last group, incidentally, not only

provides some the needed online curriculum

that Ezzell would need to cater to their

new high school students, should that option

meet with their approval, they may also

have some school funding solutions that

could shore up student numbers issue in

Ezzell to ensure a longer-term financial feasibility

for the plan. More on that in a bit.

Just a few miles west over at Sweet

Home ISD—another of the county’s three

rural districts, which has also toyed with

the notion of a high school, along with other

campus improvements, all made possible by

the board’s recent land acquisition earlier

this year—their board of directors learned

just days ago that their school superintendent,

Renee Fairchild, who they brought

on just last summer, was named the lone

finalist for Moulton ISD’s ongoing superintendent

search.

While named as a lone finalist, state

law prevents Moulton ISD from making an

official job offer—or Fairchild from accepting

said offer—until at least 21 days have

passed since they announced her as finalist.

In Fairchild’s case, that can’t happen until

Monday, May 2, at the earliest.

Still, Fairchild and the Sweet Home board had

several projects underway, not least of which came

on the heels of a well-attended recent listening session

that attracted 180-plus people from around the

Sweet Home community, all fired up one making

their district truly shine.

Before that, however, we travel just a few miles

north to come to the last—but certainly not least—

of the county’s three small country schools over at

Vysehrad ISD.

While Vysehrad remains the only rural school that

hasn’t broached high school offerings yet, school

faculty have closely followed the ones that have, as

some of their own students might likewise benefit

from staying to the smaller campuses the country

schools afford.

Where Vysehrad bears likeness to the rest, however,

comes in its need for a new school administrator.

In a posting to the school’s website made Wednesday,

April 13, Vysehrad congratulated Jason Appelt on

his new job.

“Our superintendent . . . has accepted the position

of director of Special Education for the DeWitt-

Lavaca Co-op,” it reads. “Best wishes on your next

chapter!”

Vysehrad board members met in a special meeting

on Monday, April 25, where they officially accepted

Appelt’s resignation as local district school superintendent

and met with search consultants from

Region III, to hear about how they might help them

land a new leader. Plans were in place to hire them

as the school’s search consultant, according to their

posted agenda.

SWEET HOME ISD

Sweet Home will not make use of a consultant to

find her replacement, Fairchild told the newspaper

last week. Rather, they will likely make use of a

longer-term interim superintendent, she said.

That precise service, incidentally, is what retired

El Campo ISD superintendent Mark Pool has given to

Moulton schools a couple of times now as top leadership

vacancies have occurred in their district, starting

with Todd Grandjean’s departure in early 2020.

A search consultant was used to bring in Fairchild

in July 2021, but the board still had contacts on the

applicants from that search. They are still less than

a year old, so the Sweet Home trustees seemed

confident they’d be in good shape moving forward,

Fairchild said.

Still, she and her board had several projects underway,

many stemming from the recent listening

session held at the school to hear from the public

on what they’d like to see done with all the school’s

new acreage.

For those not familiar, the school was notified, not

long after Fairchild began in Sweet Home, that one

of its former teachers had bequeathed a rather generous

donation to the district, dollars which largely

funded the previously landlocked local district’s

purchase of some 17.78 acres that abuts the school

property lines to the north and east of its existing

footprint.

More than 180 people gathered for that meeting,

and they all walked away with some great ideas,

Fairchild said, both for future expansion possibilities

as well as ways to address some of the more pressing

facility needs improvements that exist on campus.

Most of those, she already informed board members,

could be tackled with the current budgets, but

she urged trustees to take its facility planning just

as far into the future as they could dream.

“If there’s one thing sure about construction costs,

no matter when you plan something,” she said. “It’s

never going to get any cheaper than it is right now.

So, when planning these projects, dream big. Have

the bare budget version, the bit nicer one, too. But

always have the pie in the sky option there as well.

You can always come back and remove items from

a project. Not everyone can visualize just how nice

something could look, if money were no object.”

Many expressed an interest in seeing a high school

campus return to Sweet Home. A weight room and

athletics facility were also discussed, as was a possible

cafetorium and/or performance hall, along with

several general repairs/enhancements made as funds

are available each budget year.

Plans were already in place, too, to accept bids

from those interested in buying and relocating the

white wood-frame house, pens and outbuildings that

came with the recent property purchase next door.

Fairchild said they hoped to award those bids by as

soon as May.

EZZELL ISD

A special meeting was in the works for Tuesday,

April 26, during which Ezzell school board directors

were planning to meet with representatives from

Texas Virtual Schools.

Texas Virtual Schools will help supply Ezzell

students with entire courses, some of which would

even come with their own teachers, lesson plans and

everything, all as part of the school’s subscription

costs, which was usually far cheaper than hiring

staffers for every item they might want to cover,

Berckenhoff said.

“By leaving some classes as primarily online

courses, the sky’s the limit on what a student can

take, if he wants,” she said. “Take your foreign

languages, for instance. Most schools in rural areas

like ours do well to have someone like a Spanish

teacher even on staff. Still, if you have someone

like that, you’re kinda limited to what foreign languages

you can offer. Not here. You want to learn

Spanish? They’ve got it. German, That, too. Russian?

French? Chinese? Although I haven’t checked them

all specifically, I’m pretty sure they are all options,

because they bring in classes from most anyplace

in the world.”

Not just classes, either, but students, too. That

one element interested her board enough that they

wanted to hear more about that aspect before they

offered their decision on adding possible high school

classes.

What Berckenhoff said she liked about it most was

it offered her an option that she’d never considered,

one that made her far less concerned with having to

“come up with a quota to make it all work.”

Despite her best efforts, Berckenhoff said she

did well to get her average daily attendance (ADA)

numbers to more than about 90 students for next

year. That included probably about eight to 10 new

high school students, but her school numbers have

several losses coming soon as parents relocate for

new jobs and that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, those losses keep their ADA—the

very thing the state now uses as its primary metric

for funding schools—right at what it was currently,

even with 8-10 first timer high school students.

Then she heard of a program via Virtual Schools,

where, if they’re running shy of their needed ADA

numbers, they could essentially “rent” some of

Texas Virtual’s online students to add to their count,

students who are already signed up with Texas Virtual,

but they might live in Beaumont or Amarillo.

Anyplace, really.

“We get credited for them, and they do their

lessons, same as always,” she said. “And the best

part: We never have to worry about feeding them,

bus rides anywhere, discipline. We just get to count

them.”

After hearing the presentation by Texas Virtual,

Ezzell school board members planned to vote—either

yay or nay—on the proposed high school class

offerings for next school year.

As Berckenhoff pointed out last week, the board

needs to decide by month’s end, at the latest. Between

new hires, adding a couple of portable facilities,

and some other planned shifts she intends to

make before the new year gets started. “There’s still

a lot of things to still do,” she said. “We find out about

new ones every day, it seems, but we’re all learning,

too, as it goes along.”

Watch online and on the newspaper’s social media

sites for updates to this story. We will post it live as

soon as Ezzell trustees render their decision.