Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 1, 1990 TAG: 9003310512
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Elizabeth Obenshain
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The threat of losing them and the anxious recruiting of them have become our consuming interest. Valley leaders talk about quality of life and a traditional work ethic as incentives to draw industries to the area.
These same leaders are also uncomfortably confronting their perennial budget dilemma - school funding.
The decisions our community makes about education will determine just how competitive the valley is in courting jobs in the years ahead.
The days are gone when the South can lure industries by offering NEW RIVER JOURNAL ELIZABETH OBENSHAIN cheap labor. We've seen what happens to those jobs. Companies simply bolt their machinery to trucks and head south again for even cheaper wages.
Today, the companies the New River Valley and every region want demand an educated and skilled work force.
This means we have work to do. The fact is that our region does not have this reputation.
The toughest lesson I brought back from a recent year at Columbia's Graduate School of Business was Corporate America's perception of Virginia and the South.
One professor, who consults for many Fortune 500 companies, asked my class of young MBA hotshots one day, "What do you do with the problem of illiterate workers - like in Virginia, Kentucky or North Carolina?"
My outraged yelp drew chuckles from the class, but also the amazed response from the professor, "Now, Beth, you know that's true!" I was speechless. The sheer nerve of someone in New York City criticizing the state of Thomas Jefferson for illiteracy!
I came to realize that not only this professor but most of my classmates, some of whom will be the next decade's corporate leaders, regard Virginia and the rest of the South as some sort of Third World locale. Venezuela is as familiar to them as Virginia.
I'd like to chalk up their comments to ignorance and arrogance - there are certainly traces of both in their attitude.
But when we look at ourselves closely, the statistics are shocking. In Pulaski County, 53 percent of adults 25 and older have never finished high school. Other local counties' rates are just as sobering.
How are we going to compete as long as our children drop out of school before they are book literate - much less computer literate?
How, especially, are we going to compete with Japan's educated work force where workers are not just encouraged but required to use their brains every day to suggest how to improve productivity?
How will we compete with Europe? Not only do we face the threat of a more unified Western Europe in 1992, but the Eastern Bloc nations are going to be incredibly hungry competitors in the years ahead.
Today, it is fashionable and politically popular to be the education president, or the education governor or the education guru . . . the only problem is, no one wants the job of bankrolling education.
After the hoopla over President Bush's education summit in Charlottesville last fall, the national mandates sounded great; the only problem is the federal government wants the states to pay for them.
Virginia has some great ideas; the only problem is it wants the localities to pay for them.
Everyone everywhere wants better education; we just don't want our property taxes to go up.
Yet good teachers and computers cost money. A recent study by the Harvard School of Education found, not surprisingly, that salaries have a lot to do with whether young men and women stay in teaching. Those with the highest teacher exam scores are twice as likely to leave because of low pay.
Good schools, innovative schools, cost money. The situation is so serious that last Monday school superintendents from across the state gathered in Roanoke to form a coalition to combat discrepancies in funding among the state's school systems.
Yet I can't help wondering if dollars alone can be the answer as our schools deal with children increasingly bruised by today's social problems.
Maybe it's time more of us assumed a personal responsibility to see that children don't slide through the cracks and end up as dropout statistics.
Maybe some of us should be going into the schools, whether as individual volunteers or as part of a business partnership.
For too long, school volunteers came in only one shape - homeroom mothers. I even had a request this year to photograph a local banker reading to elementary school children - a in a classroom was such a rarity.
Maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe more of us, women and men, should take an hour of our week and head out to our local elementary school to help in a small way to improve local education. In the long run, it certainly wouldn't hurt our efforts at economic development, either.
by CNB