SHAOZHUO CUI Special to The Roanoke Times

Price's Fork Elementary School fourth-graders watch local artist Jane Vance paint. Shown are (counterclockwise from center) Caleb Smith (green shirt), Morgan McCoy, Makayla Williford, Sydney Dublin, Chance Oswski-Pappas and Colton Long.

Each Friday, they're listening and watching as local artist Jane Vance illustrates the history of the community's school on pieces of linen.

Vance is the featured artist in a community quilting project that will examine the past, present and future of Price's Fork Elementary School. She's helping to paint scenes that will be sewn onto a quilt to be displayed at the new elementary school in Price's Fork.

Work on the new school is expected to be complete by 2011, so Principal Dollie Cottrill and art teacher Marcee Repass wanted students -- and the community as whole -- to have a project on which they could reflect. Students who graduate from the elementary school go on to attend classes at Blacksburg Middle School.

"PFE's students need to know something about their heritage so that they can point to it with pride when they transition to Blacksburg Middle School," Cottrill wrote in a grant proposal to the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. The school received $2,975 from the two organizations.

The project "will enable PFE students to see that their heritage is important and valuable in other settings," the proposal says.

Vance will visit the school for the next 12 weeks and meet with small groups of students to paint and discuss the pieces she's designing.

Last week, a group of fourth-graders -- expected to be the final class of fifth-graders in the 1950s-era K-5 school -- watched as she painted coal miners.

"All of our quilt squares tell a story," she told them.

Some of the sections will have paintings of each of the seven schools that combined to form Price's Fork Elementary. Others will be landscapes or allusions to teachers' travels. For example, Vance hides an elephant in the mining piece, an homage to fifth-grade teacher Jenna Swann's visit to Nepal.

Those tales may not be ones the entire community recognizes, but students will be able to explore all the intricacies of the quilt with their parents, Vance said.

"This is your world I get to paint," she told students, one of whom proclaimed the project as "the newest form of art."

A few completed squares of the quilt already are on display across from the school's gymnasium.

In August, the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors approved a land-exchange deal that includes a parcel for the new elementary school. The county will purchase 16 acres from the Virginia Tech Foundation and will exchange the land for 20 acres of Virginia Tech property on Prices Fork Road.

The transfer is waiting on approval from Gov. Tim Kaine.

The county is paying $1 million for the 16-acre property, which is in west Blacksburg near Plantation Road and is a portion of Heth farmland.

The other 20 acres is on the south side of Prices Fork Road just east of the current Price's Fork Elementary.

The new, 600-student school would house about 200 when it opens, and it could accommodate redistricting to relieve other overcrowded elementary schools in Blacksburg.

HIRING

Resumes coming in for superintendent

Pulaski County began accepting applications for its soon-to-be-open school superintendent's job this week. Resumes will be collected through Nov. 13. The school board wants to fill outgoing Superintendent Don Stowers' spot by February.

Stowers plans to retire in December.

The Pulaski County School Board, which is working with the Virginia School Boards Association, has sent a survey to parents and community members to find out what they want in a new schools leader.

Meanwhile, Saturday marks the end of the application period for Montgomery County's school superintendent opening.

The national search firm with which Montgomery County is contracted to replace Tiffany Anderson will present a list of finalists to school board members Nov. 10. Anderson left the county in June to take over a small charter school in Missouri.

The Montgomery County School Board also wants to have the new leader in place by December.