By Charlotte Matherly, contributor
Security camera installations in Rockingham County Public Schools are almost complete, save for two final schools.
“I think it’s gonna be a great tool … another layer to help us keep our schools safe,” Superintendent Larry Shifflett said at Monday’s school board meeting.
The only schools left are the Massanutten Technical Center and McGaheysville Elementary School, where officials are waiting for some renovations to be completed before putting the cameras up.
The devices come from a $4.2 million contract with Verkada, a global security company. They’re placed in hallways, stairwells and doorways, but not classrooms. The cameras won’t record audio.
Caleb Bailey, the district’s director of school safety and security, said this summer when the board approved the contract that school officials weren’t looking to surveil students and teachers but wanted the technology as assurance in case of emergency.
“We’re creating a safety net, not a prison system,” he told the board in June.
Budget process underway
The months-long creation of the school division’s next budget has officially begun. Shifflett and Justin Moyers, chief financial and operating officer, will start meeting with principals next week about spending requests for the 2026-27 school year.
Some school board members had requested to move the timeline ahead, but Moyers said that’s easier said than done. One major factor of Rockingham County’s revenue – the share of funding it will get from the state – won’t be known until early next year.
“The last two times I’ve participated, it feels like a last-minute scramble in March,” said board chair Sara Horst. “I think that’s what we’re hoping to avoid.”
A public hearing on the budget, which isn’t yet written, is currently scheduled for Jan. 12.
Redistricting concerns persist
As school board members face a flood of new people expected to move to Rockingham County in the next several years, they’ve floated several possibilities. Among them are building a new elementary school and redrawing district lines to shuffle the population more evenly among schools.
Kenneth Pearce, a parent who recently moved to the area, told school board members on Monday that when he started looking at local schools, he was surprised at the “level of inequity” within the district when it comes to academic achievement and opportunity.
“As long as those inequities persist, I think you have to understand that parents will continue to have very strong opinions about which schools their children attend,” Pearce said.
The idea of redistricting, while still a ways out, comes less than two years after the last time the school board redrew district boundaries, shifting 540 students to different schools for the 2024-25 school year.
“Redistricting again, after just two years, creates a kind of instability that I find extremely problematic,” Pearce said. “New housing just doesn’t get approved, built and occupied that fast that we should be caught unawares by that kind of population growth within such a short period.”
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