Passing the hot potato: School Board budget goes to supervisors
Analysis and Commentary
By James P. Gannon
At a sparsely attended public hearing held March 18 on the proposed 2008-2009 school budget for Rappahannock County public schools, Flint Hill resident Bill Dietel gave the School Board some advice that’s worth pondering further.
Dietel, always a strong advocate of improving the public schools, told the five school board members that it wasn’t their job to consider where the money would come from to fully fund the school budget.
“You are not responsible for solving the tax problems of the county,” Dietel said. “That’s the job of the citizens and the Board of Supervisors.” Taxpayers who came to school board meetings to complain about rising property taxes and rising school spending were simply “bullying” the School Board, Dietel asserted.
“This is no time to backpedal” on the school budget, Dietel added. “It is all too easy to let bullies discourage you….Whether the resources are there to pay the bill is not your responsibility….With you resides the moral obligation to defend the education of the children.”
Dietel’s lecture was music to the ears of school board members, who came to the meeting expecting some taxpayer complaints about school spending but heard none.
Two members of the board publicly embraced Dietel’s description of their responsibilities. Aline Johnson of Piedmont District agreed that “our responsibility is to the children of the county and to the teachers and the staff.” Chairman Ken Marlor of Stonewall-Hawthorn district said he was heartened by Dietel’s comments. “Our core responsibility is to the students; the five of us are here for the students.”
All this raises important questions about the mission of the school board and the issue of whom the board represents. Does the school board represent only the interests of the school students, teachers and staff? Does it have any responsibility to consider the impact of its decisions on taxpayers? Bill Dietel says it does not, and at least some of the board members appear to agree with him.
School board members are elected by the voters of Rappahannock County, which seems to suggest they are responsible to the voters who elected them–but Dietel’s view denies that. If their only obligation is to provide the best possible education, without worrying about how the taxpayers of the county will pay for it (the Dietel Doctrine) then their responsibility seems to be divorced from the people who elect them.
Less than 48 hours after hearing Dietel absolve them of the need to consider taxpayers, the board seemed to take his message to heart.
In their final work session on the school budget, the board voted to ask for more money from county taxpayers than Superintendent Robert Chappell had proposed. Chappell, in an effort to restrain the increase in requested county funding, had proposed $415,000 in savings, including elimination of seven jobs. On the evening before the public budget hearing, the board had voted to accept these cuts; on the Thursday after the Tuesday evening meeting, the board decided not to accept all the savings after all.
The board decided to reduce Chappell’s package of $415,000 in savings to $358,000–in effect, boosting spending by $57,000. The board rejected Chappell’s proposal to eliminate two teaching positions, instead voting to eliminate only one. This they did even though they were not sure where the extra teaching job would be used. “This position could be used in Kindergarten, first grade or perhaps another RCES grade level depending on actual enrollment in August,” Chappell’s announcement of the board action said.
Chappell had based his recommendation of eliminating two teacher positions on the undeniable decline in school enrollment–from 1,002 two years ago to 941 this year to his projected 902 students next year. This year’s kindergarten class turned out to be much smaller than expected (57 rather than 75 students) and next year’s incoming K-class is expected to be about the same. The trend allowed Chappell to propose consolidating Kindergarten into three classes instead of four, and doing the same in first grade–eliminating two teaching positions.
This is exactly the sort of enrollment-based staffing that was strongly recommended in the “School Efficiency Review” recently completed by an outside educational consulting firm, MGT of America, Inc.
“The school division does not have a comprehensive staffing plan on which to base personnel decisions in light of declining student enrollment,” the consultant’s report said, in one of its most significant criticisms in the report. It said “there is no comprehensive plan with standards for adjusting staffing levels, or for justifying existing staffing levels.”
Chappell quickly promised that he would develop an enrollment-based staffing plan. His first concrete step in such a move was to propose reducing two teaching positions in Kindergarten and first grade to reflect the small incoming classes. His plan was rational, and enrollment-based.
The fact that the school board decided to reject his recommendation, and add back into the budget a teaching position even though they don’t know where it might be needed, raises questions about whether the school board believes in the concept of enrollment-based staffing.
The $12 million school budget approved by the school board and sent on to the Board of Supervisors today asks for an increase in county funding of $470,709 over the amount provided for this school year. County taxpayers would provide $8,759,098, or nearly 73% of the entire budget–a far higher proportion than taxpayers in surrounding counties pay for schools.
That’s $9,711 in county funds per student, based on 902 projected students.
County taxpayers would pay 5.7% more for schools that are growing smaller. The $472,541 increase in county funding would require a boost in the county’s real estate tax rate of three cents per $100 in value, unless the county could cut other parts of the budget to offset it–an unlikely prospect.
The “hot potato” now lands in the laps of the five members of the Board of Supervisors–who cannot pretend that they have no responsibility to the taxpayers of the county. The Dietel Doctrine won’t be in effect on Monday, April 28, when the supervisors will hold their public hearing on the budget–nor on May 5, when they will decide how much county taxpayers will pay for their schools.
-- James P. Gannon
Write a comment