Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 22, 1994 TAG: 9412220113
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID M. POOLE AND MARGARGET EDDS STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A dentist who examined 300 children from low-income Eastern Shore families found most had six to eight cavities each.
Now, the grant program that paid for the school-based dental clinic is slated for elimination under budget cuts recommended by Gov. George Allen.
"You can't imagine what the need is," White said. "It's almost a mandatory service in all the schools where there is poverty. Who's going to pay for it if the state doesn't?''
From across Virginia, a chorus of dismay is rising on behalf of an array of disadvantaged people who have counted on state programs slated for cutbacks or extinction.
The cuts are the price Allen says he's willing to pay to free up money for prison construction and tax relief that he believes are favored by most Virginians.
A married couple with two children that makes $40,000 would save $46 in taxes the first year under Allen's plan and $368 in the fifth year. About 84,000 low-income families would no longer have to pay a state tax.
Assessing the full impact of tax relief on individuals who rely on state services is difficult, because details of the plan are just now sifting out and because most state workers have been told not to talk to the press.
Some human service advocates warn that tax relief will fray the state's already fragile safety net.
But their greater concern is that Allen's budget recommendations for 1995-96 are only the first round, and that cuts will escalate in the final two years of Allen's administration.
A look at three programs targeted by the Allen administration shows there are tradeoffs for tax cuts and new prisons.
Project Discovery
Tellas Minor knew he wanted to go to college, but he wasn't sure how he would get there.
He got plenty of inspiration from his mother, an assembly-line worker from Roanoke who steered him toward the college education she never had for herself.
He needed help figuring how to chose a college, filling out the applications and paying his tuition.
That's where Project Discovery came in.
The program - funded in part through a state Department of Education grant - enabled Minor to visit four college campuses in Virginia and North Carolina. Application fees were waived when he applied to two of them.
"It's a struggle," Minor, now a sophomore at James Madison University, said of his family's economic station. "The $20-$30 application fee was a great help. That was $20-$30 my mother didn't have to pay."
The Allen administration wants to strip $16 million in annual spending for Project Discovery - which helps 3,000 disadvantaged teens set their sights on college each year - and six other programs, and lump them together in a single block grant program funded at $3 million a year.
Beverly Sgro, Allen's education secretary, said the block grant would give local school systems more flexibility in designing programs for disadvantaged children.
Sgro said localities can make up what amounts to a $13 million cut for funding of at-risk programs through greater "efficiency."
Betty Pullen, executive director of the Roanoke-based Project Discovery, said she fears the program - which is now administered by agencies outside the school system - may get lost in the shuffle.
"We're keeping our fingers crossed and trying to make noise," she said.
Mental Health
Valerie Marsh, executive director of the Virginia Alliance for the Mentally Ill, said her group is concerned about Allen's attempt to save $6 million by limiting treatment of "less serious mental disabilities."
Marsh and other mental health advocates say Virginia's system already lets too many mentally ill people fall through the cracks.
After four years of tight budgeting under former Gov. Douglas Wilder, the system already is "cut down to the bone."
"I don't see how [Allen's proposal] can do anything but hurt the seriously mental ill," she said.
School health clinics
Linda Christopher was at her wits' end when her 8-year-old daughter, Sheena, was suffering from a recurring toothache.
Christopher took her daughter to a dentist in nearby Chincoteague in Accomack County. But Sheena was so squirmy and afraid that the dentist referred her to the nearest pediatric dentist, 45 miles away in Salisbury, Md.
Even if her car had been working, Christopher could not get time off from her job.
So Sheena accepted the pain.
Then, the second-grader came home from school with a permission slip for a state-funded dental clinic that had opened at North Accomac Elementary School.
The dentist filled one cavity, capped one tooth and pulled another. All of it free of charge.
The trailer and equipment for the in-school dental clinic was funded by a state Department of Education grant program that the Allen administration wants to abolish.
Sgro, the education secretary, said the governor believes that schools should focus on academics and that in-school clinics only divert funds from schools' primary mission.
Sgro said that in-school clinics are "redundant" because they provide services already available from local Health Departments.
by CNB