ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 11, 1996 TAG: 9601110084
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
MEMO: ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on January 12, 1996.
Montgomery School Board member Jim Klagge said Thursday he was joking
at Tuesday's School Board meeting when he suggested the group find ways
to make the Board of Supervisors feel guilty about its past lack of
support for school funding. Klagge said he doesn't disagree with the
need to lobby the supervisors, but said the "guilt" suggestion was only
his dry wit at work.
Michael Smith spread his arms wide to make a point about next year's Montgomery County school budget.
"We're being pulled two ways," said the new School Board member representing the Prices Fork area.
On the one hand, is the schools' goal of reducing pupil-teacher ratios to 20-to-1 by 2006. This emerged as the schools' top priority through a two-year school improvement study. But this goal means spending big bucks: every 1-point drop in the ratio costs $2 million, school officials say.
On the other, is the goal of attracting and keeping top-flight teachers and staff with good salaries. Last year, when the School Board didn't get all the money it asked for from the county Board of Supervisors, it chose to hire more teachers, in turn reducing a planned pay raise from 3 percent to 1.2 percent. The School Board boosted that raise to 2 percent with an increase last month.
"Welcome to the board, that's what we're here for," School Board veteran David Moore said after Smith's dramatization.
Smith and his School Board colleagues wrestled with the dilemma at a Tuesday-night work session, the group's first crack at the budget proposed last week by Superintendent Herman Bartlett.
Much of the time was spent asking detailed budget questions that Bartlett and his staff will try to answer at the School Board's next session, at 7:30 p.m. Monday in the Junkin Street offices in Christiansburg. The School Board is to hold a public hearing on the budget on Jan. 23 and adopt a budget by month's end. It then will become part of the total county budget that the Board of Supervisors will review between February and early April.
The board Tuesday talked about the broad themes of the budget, including how to sell it to the public and the county Board of Supervisors, which will decide how much of it to fund.
Bartlett has proposed a $53.1 million budget - a $5.7 million, or 12 percent, increase for 1996-97. Nearly half that jump, some $2.6 million, would go to give school employees a 7 percent pay increase after July 1. Part of that raise would be to make up for the current year's smaller raises.
During Tuesday's two-hour budget session, some board members seemed, if anything, more ardent than Bartlett in contending that the school division deserves such a large funding increase because the Board of Supervisors steadily has reduced schools as a budget priority since 1991.
If the rhetoric stays as it is or goes up a notch then it could mean a worsening of relations between the two boards after three years of improvement. For instance, Smith said the School Board should have sued the Board of Supervisors for what he views as a funding reduction in the recession-year budget of 1991-92. Jim Klagge suggested the group consider ways to make the supervisors feel guilty about its past lack of support.
Most Board of Supervisors members, when faced with a similar argument last year, said the school budget has grown every year. They have said they need to balance such large funding-increase requests against competing requests and their desire to avoid major real-estate tax increases. Most supervisors believe that tax is regressive in that it hurts elderly landowners who have less ability to pay.
The tone of some comments Tuesday, though, was that if the county wants a top-drawer school system - a goal supported by the FOCUS 2006 study of 1992-93 - then it must be willing to pay for it.
Of the $5.7 million in new funding that Bartlett has proposed, members noted, three-quarters would go to personnel costs, including the pay raises and the hiring of 26 new classroom teachers and 14 new support staff members.
Aside from bringing pupil-teacher ratios down further, the new staff members are necessary to accommodate growth in the school system, which has climbed from approximately 8,450 students in 1991 to 8,960 this year.
That growth is the impetus behind a four-school building program that's been under discussion for the last year. The Riner area will get a new elementary school now that the Board of Supervisors has agreed to borrow up to $8 million this spring to pay for construction.
The Montgomery County School Board's next budget session will be at 7:30 p.m. Monday in the Junkin Street offices in Christiansburg. The School Board will hold a public hearing on the budget on Jan. 23.
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