THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, April 18, 1995 TAG: 9504180004
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
When Virginia Beach City Council, School Superintendent Sid Faucette and School Board members meet today, improving programs for gifted students will be high on the agenda. It should be.
But redressing what so many parents feel is neglect of the gifted is only this year's most prominent piece of the puzzle of school spending in Virginia Beach - some $429,893,457 as recommended by city staff for school operations and capital costs.
Gifted students have not been a priority of the Beach school system. Why, this year, have they become a priority of sorts? Partly because parents are complaining more loudly than before. Partly because a citizens advisory committee, mandated by the state, has been researching and recommending remedies for several years. Yet, in this budget year of the gifted, it finds its recommendations and priorities abruptly rearranged.
But the gifted are Topic A, as staff writer Karen Weintraub reported Sunday, mostly because the superintendent has attached his proposed gifted programs - programs that have been unsung, unspecific and not yet board-approved - to a gamut of other, larger causes: to the increase in portable classrooms; to funding (or lack of it) for school facilities, additions and renovations; and especially to schools' request for $167 million more in city tax revenue and bonds, and to the city manager's refusal to concur in that request.
Do Virginia Beach schools need more money to eliminate portables the city thought would be eliminated by now? And to complete additions (and thus avoid the dread redistricting) parents have long thought were on the drawing board? And to buy Celebration Station, the facility that the superintendent leased and renovated with several millions of taxpayers' money, that has stood half-empty for almost two years, that the superintendent wants taxpayers to buy for almost $7 million and to renovate with some $8 million more to house
Flexibility is a fine thing, and Superintendent Faucette can be flexible. Having requested $1.75 million to renovate Kemps Landing School as a magnet for middle-schoolers, for example, and berated city officials for denying that request, the superintendent now says Kemps Landing can be renovated for $600,000.
But with taxpayers' money, accountability comes with flexibility. Do Virginia Beach schools need more money? If so, to meet which needs? These are hard questions to answer without knowing how efficiently and effectively past hundreds of millions have been spent and precisely how schools plan to allot and spend the coming year's millions.
Those answers aren't easy to learn from the public record. But the public deserves to know. And that, council and School Board members should remember, is the main reason for today's public session. by CNB