THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504080111
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
``I don't like to tie the quality of education to the dollars spent,'' Sid Faucette told a press conference Wednesday.
For somebody who doesn't like doing it, he does it a lot.
The Beach school superintendent warned his audience that unless City Council restores the full operating and capital funding schools requested for '95-'96, students in this skinflint city's school system won't get out of portables, or into the best colleges. Without a successful $106.6 million bond referendum to fund schools' technology initiative, students will enter the world of electronic wizardry with the technological equivalent of ``not even a plow and a mule.''
Is subsistence schooling really all that $429 million will buy? Is that all that a billion or so spent on schools since 1991 has bought?
Last month, Dr. Faucette assured an ``education forum'' sponsored by the Council of Civic Organizations that the Beach school system is ``tops.'' Last week, he warns that it's toppling: It ill-serves the gifted, the at-risk and the 80 percent in between. It underpays its teachers. It continually plays catch-up in school construction. Among Virginia localities, it's in the bottom 10 in per-pupil spending.
Beach schools are both tops and toppling? How's he fig-ure?
Like this, I gather from Dr. Faucette's presentation: Given what this system has to work with, it does wonders. Given what it requests to work with, the system could do mir-a-cles. Given the room to rise in the city's real-estate-tax rate (the region's low), the system could get what it requests to work with.
But city officials and not a few citizens aren't sure schools are getting sufficient bang for today's almost-half-billion school-budget bucks. They're even less sure how those bucks get prioritized among school projects. There are ready millions, for example, to build, lease or buy additional facilities. Meantime, trailers stay full of teachers, students and administrators, existing schools await additions and some facilities sit half-empty or idle. Technology's a top priority, yet the funds run out on two new schools before the contractor gets the computers in. And no way except a(nother) tax hike can the schools update that plow and that mule, making a passel of pupils, Dr. Faucette fears, tomorrow's ``tech-o-peasants.''
Will the fault lie, as Dr. Faucette implies, solely with penny-pinchers at City Hall?
One man's frill is another's insulin. Public officials who spend public money have to get tired of being second-guessed. But the questioning goes with the job. So should the answers, flying as fast as the questions, and just as thick with documentation.
So far, the school-budget debate has been charge here and countercharge there. Before fore Council votes on the subject, how about a genuine debate: Get Superintendent Faucette, school finance chief Mordecai Smith, City Manager Jim Spore and budget director Dean Block to the same place at the same time. Pat them down thoroughly. And let them, figuratively, duke it out. by CNB