ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, January 6, 1996 TAG: 9601090009
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: PULASKI
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
"You're going to be overworked and underpaid," Pulaski County School Board Attorney Tom McCarthy told the new board at its first meeting Thursday night.
Compensation, he said, would have to be in the knowledge that the board helped bring better educational opportunities to the county's young people.
The new members - Jeff Bain, Beth Nelson and Rhea Saltz - joined Ron Chaffin and Lewis Pratt, who were re-elected Nov. 7, in meeting administrative staff members and spending a couple of hours chatting generally about upcoming educational challenges. Saltz has served on the board before, so little of this was new to him.
"We won an election and ... we made history. We are the first elected School Board in Pulaski County," said Chaffin, the current chairman.
Discussions ranged from the order in which members would vote - seniority, age, alphabetical order - to financial obstacles facing the school system.
Chaffin said "anything that has to do with procedure and how we conduct our meetings" is wide open for board decisions. Much of that will be decided at the board's first official meeting at 7 p.m. Jan. 18. The board also set 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Jan. 22 for its first budget workshop.
Superintendent Bill Asbury predicted this year would be the most difficult budget year he has seen since he has been superintendent.
The current budget is more than $1.6 million, up by $517,705 from the 1994-95 school year. In the coming year, the formula governing how much state money goes to schools has worked out so that 20 percent of the state's school systems - mostly in Northern Virginia - will be getting more money and the others, like Pulaski County, will get less.
The target date for Asbury to present the first budget draft to the board is Feb. 8.
Pulaski County is still trying to find out how many of its students are attending city schools in Radford, Asbury said, so the county can get more state money based on its school-age population. "We don't just need the numbers. We actually need the names and addresses," Asbury said, and Radford has said those are confidential.
The board and staff discussed what role technology will play in shaping future education. But state money for technology proposed by Gov. George Allen is not the whole solution, Asbury said. "You can't just take the money and buy the computers and put them in the schools," he said, because many aging schools in Pulaski County and other localities lack the wiring, air-conditioning and other essentials for handling them.
The costs of meeting state Standards of Quality and buying up-to-date textbooks will be among the other fiscal challenges coming up, Asbury said.
Bain suggested that the board work out a schedule to visit the county's various schools.
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