ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 17, 1996 TAG: 9602190014
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: PULASKI
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
Under one budget plan, Pulaski County school employees would get a 5 percent salary increase next year, fringe benefits would increase, a program emphasizing sound preparation in lower grades would expand, and up-to-date textbooks would become available.
Under Plan B, none of that would happen. Salaries would stay the same, and so would the Critical Years/Critical Skills program for the lower grades. New textbooks would not be added.
Plan A would cost $1.7 million more than Plan B. With only about $517,000 expected in additional state funding next year, Plan A would mean the county would have to come up with more than $1.69 million in local funds for schools.
Guess which plan is more likely to be approved?
Superintendent Bill Asbury guessed that it would be Plan C, which will be hammered out at a series of budget workshops by the School Board.
"I don't know what Plan C looks like. No one in this room does right now," Asbury told the School Board Thursday night. Board members will sit down and talk over budget matters with the Board of Supervisors at 7 p.m. March 11 to get a better idea of where funding stands.
No matter which plan gets pushed, the school system will see some innovative advances in the 1996-97 school year.
A workplace competentency certification program will be added next year, because a grant has been secured through the Blue Ridge Training Council to fund it. It would emphasize gearing up students for employment and profiling businesses in the region that would hire them.
A distance learning center will open at Pulaski County High School, again because of a grant already secured. It will allow a teacher in one location to teach classes in other places over two-way television.
Under either budget, the school system would end its facilities maintenance and cleaning contract with Service Master and hire its own maintenance and cleaning operations supervisor. The new procedure is expected to cost the same as the contract.
Asbury said it will be necessary to find a way for teachers and other school employees to get in-service training in technology. New employees will be tested for technological skills, and Asbury said the system will work "gently" with current employees who are still in the process of becoming comfortable with the new technologies needed.
"I'm one of them," he said.
It may be harder to get funding for a proposed computer repair and maintenance offering at the county vocational school. Because of the expense of the equipment, it would cost about $100,000 to start and perhaps twice that much in its second year.
"The world of work is changing, and especially in the area of information processing," Asbury said.
Access to the Internet at Pulaski County High School, Dublin and Pulaski Middle Schools and Dublin Elementary School, with eventual expansion to all schools, is already under way at two of those schools thanks to a project secured by the Southwest Virginia Governor's School for school connections on the information highway. Training in word processing and desktop publishing is another goal for the high school, as well as hiring a technician for software support who would work with teachers.
If the entire Plan A wish list could be granted, it would increase the total school budget from this year's $24.9 million to more than $27 million.
Included on that list are salary increases totaling $975,000; the vocational technology course, $100,000; an additional elementary counselor, $45,000; new textbooks in science, language arts and social studies, $500,000; technology initiatives, $400,000; and expanding the hours worked by contract nurses in schools, $10,000.
None of the plans includes any money for the aging school buildings which needed to be renovated or replaced. What to do about the physical facilities has been under study for several years, and was the subject of a community dialog Feb. 8 at which most of the some 300 people who attended expressed a preference for smaller community schools rather than consolidation.
A follow-up meeting is planned next month.
In other business, the board adopted a resolution honoring Ron Chaffin for his leadership as chairman from 1992 through 1995. Chaffin, who has been on the board since mid-1985, was one of two incumbents re-elected last year.
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