ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, January 17, 1996 TAG: 9601170018
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
NORTH CAROLINA and Virginia are in various ways competitors, particularly for economic development.
With growing envy but still-inadequate self-examination, Virginia officials have watched their neighbors to the south develop the Research Triangle and other manifestations of forward-thinking political and economic leadership.
Now comes a small tale illustrating a number of things, one of which has to do with competitive advantage - and the reality that economic prospects depend on more than low taxes and cheap land.
The story has attracted no notice in Richmond's corridors of power, but it does illustrate Virginia's need to ponder the value we attach to world-class education.
In 1994, the commonwealth lost an important asset to North Carolina. No, it wasn't a footloose factory moving operations and jobs south of the border. It was a human being, who lived then and still lives in Carroll County.
Her name is Marion Goldwasser. She's a teacher.
For 24 years, Goldwasser taught superbly in Carroll County schools, opening windows on the world for her students in this isolated, rural county. In 1991, she was voted Teacher of the Year.
Three years later, however, she left to take a job with the Mount Airy, N.C., school system, within commuting distance of her Carroll County farm.
Goldwasser may have quit her Virginia job for any number of reasons, but one clear factor was the inadequate support she got from bureaucrats in the Carroll County schools when she was caught up in a censorship controversy.
In 1992, a Hillsville radio evangelist and a few parents protested Goldwasser's use of a novel (``The Floatplane Notebooks,'' by North Carolina author Clyde Edgerton) in her 11th-grade honors English class. The protesters called Goldwasser names and demanded her dismissal because the book contains a few pages with sexual content.
A school administrator called the matter a confidential ``personnel'' issue. The book was ordered removed.
After Goldwasser filed a grievance and the School Board returned to its ostensible procedure for dealing with such protests, the book's use was allowed, but only in senior honors classes. Meanwhile, administrators' failure to defend one of their best teachers' judgment - against the narrow-minded calumny of a self-appointed preacher who had dropped out of elementary school - had already disappointed Goldwasser and dishonored the county.
Last week it was reported that Goldwasser taught five of the six sections of Mount Airy's 10th-grade English students who outscored their peers in all other North Carolina schools on statewide English exams.
Goldwasser said she was ``thrilled for the students,'' and why not? They're the best in the state.
It just happens to be a state other than Virginia.
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