Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, October 30, 1995                   TAG: 9510300017
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NOT FIXED YET

By enabling schools to put and keep teacher pay at competitive levels, money can be a tool for recruiting and retaining good teachers. By depressing teacher salaries, too little money can propel good teachers to other districts or out of the profession altogether.

By enabling schools to lower class sizes, money can contribute to a proven means of improving instructional quality, especially in the early grades.

By enabling schools to acquire computer and communications technology - and more than just one per school, or one per classroom - money can help train Virginia's youngsters for the world of work and citizenship they'll be entering as adults. It can help students in the remotest parts of the state gain access to specialized and up-to-date information resources.

By enabling schools to do these things, money can help lay the groundwork for future prosperity, by expanding and enhancing the quality of opportunities available to children from disadvantaged environments as well as the sons and daughters of the affluent.

In short, it matters whether nearly $9,000 is spent on each student per year, as is the case in some Virginia school districts, or not much more than $4,000, as is the case in others. Money does not guarantee educational success, but it is one building block toward that goal.

These numbers are from a report just out from the Virginia Education Association; they need not be taken as absolute truth (methodologies differ) for the main point to be understood: The resources devoted to the state's schoolchildren vary widely according to where they live.

Granted, some of the disparity is illusory: The highest-spending districts tend to be in Northern Virginia, where living costs run about 20 percent more than the state average. That does not explain disparities of more than 100 percent.

Granted, too, not all the disparity is attributable to inadequacies in the state's school-funding mechanisms, by which localities with lower tax bases or higher numbers of at-risk students are supposed to get a leg up. Some of the disparity is the result of localities declining to put in sufficient tax effort for their share of the costs.

Still, failure to appropriate enough state money for public education remains a principal reason for the persistence of school-funding disparities in Virginia. The gains of the '80s came to a halt during the recession of the early '90s, and the lost ground has yet to be made up now that state revenues are back up.

An omnibus education act, pushed by Democrats in the past session, should help. It earmarks state lottery money for class-size reductions and more computer technology. It will mean little, though, if it merely replaces school money that otherwise would have been appropriated without the earmark.

The disparity problem in Virginia public education remains, in any event, a long way from being fixed.