Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 5, 1991 TAG: 9103050022
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Greg Edwards
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
With that in mind, consider the Montgomery County School Board, which - like other school boards around Virginia - has struggled to prepare a budget for the next school year that takes into account a decline in state funds and the recessionary economy.
The School Board has sent the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors a $38.95 million budget for 1991-92. The proposed budget is $800,421 less than the current year's adjusted budget - and $3.05 million less than what the school system thought it really needed next year.
The proposal freezes all salaries for school employees, except for a 2-percent raise for cafeteria workers. It cuts 27 new teacher and teacher-support jobs that had been planned.
Neither Superintendent Harold Dodge nor School Board members were happy with the proposed budget. "The next round [of cuts] and we're laying people off . . . we're cutting programs," Dodge warned.
In Virginia's system of appointed school boards, board members are charged with writing budgets that provide for the educational needs of school children. Accountability to taxpayers falls to the elected governing body (the Board of Supervisors (in Montgomery's case), which must decide whether to fund a school board's request.
The Montgomery School Board stepped out of the schoolroom door this year and put its finger in the economic and political winds to gauge whether its budget was going to fly.
That was not the School Board's job. That was the Board of Supervisors' job.
But the School Board thought it should be realistic and cut its own budget anyway.
Not everyone agreed.
"If a $38-million budget is not what is needed, it is your responsibility to fight for more," Sandy Webster, president of the Blacksburg High PTSA, said during a budget hearing.
Harvard Economist Robert B. Reich would probably agree with Webster. Writing in Atlantic Monthly in February, Reich argued that in a global economy national wealth no longer depends, as it once did, on the accumulation of money in the hands of American capitalists.
It depends, instead, on the development of the skills and minds of the country's citizens, and on transportation and communications systems needed to link those skills to the global economy. The same premise applies to state and local wealth.
The tie between American capitalists and the U.S. economy is unraveling as more American money is invested abroad, Reich says.
In the global economy, the skills and brainpower of America's work force and the quality of its transportation and communication links to the world are what make the country unique and attractive to investors, he says.
As worldwide competition reduces profits on standard goods that can be turned out on assembly lines anywhere in the world, the real money is to be made by those with the knowledge and skills to identify and solve problems in unique ways, Reich says.
The development of knowledge and skills is where education comes in.
Unlike machinery that wears out and raw materials that are mined out or used up, knowledge and skills improve with practice. And the more they improve the more they are in demand, Reich says.
But unless a region has good skills and resources, only low wages and low taxes are left to lure investors, he says.
"All too often, [governments] bargain for routine jobs that will be automated out of existence in years to come or else will drift to the Third World," Reich writes.
"Lacking educated workers and an up-to-date infrastructure, many of our governors and mayors have little to offer except what is euphemistically knows as a `good business environment' - meaning low wages, few regulations, low taxes and generous subsidies."
With Reich's thoughts in mind, consider how often we here in Virginia have heard politicians tout our state's "good business climate."
Then consider their commitment to education - and whether they're doing us a favor in the long run.
\ AUTHOR NOTE: Greg Edwards covers Montgomery County government for this newspaper.
by CNB