Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 17, 1990                   TAG: 9004170474
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SHORTFALL

Demanded by the supervisors in exchange for a $500,000 emergency bailout, the takeover was approved Thursday night on a 3-2 vote of the School Board. The wonder is that two board members voted against it. Where but from the supervisors did they expect to get the money?

Perhaps the new system can prevent from happening what exactly did happen: an overrun of $1 million in school spending on a project that was never budgeted. Whatever the merits of the specific project - and trying to make a dropout-prevention program more workable is hard to fault - it should not have been undertaken unless school officials knew exactly how it could be funded from cuts made elsewhere.

Perhaps it's a reflection of human nature that it takes a crisis to do what ought to be done anyway. It required a similar problem several years ago for Roanoke City to put school accounts under the administration of the city finance office.

But combining the functions of the county (or city) and school finance offices would be worthwhile in any event. Having the county perform the routine tasks of school finances - billing, purchasing, payroll and so on - is expected to save $100,000 next year.

(Of course, another way of looking at it is that failure to combine the offices until now has cost the county hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years.)

The dissenting School Board members argued that it would give the county supervisors more control over school finances. But in light of the shortfall fiasco, that seems a point in favor of the takeover, not against it. After all, the supervisors - not the School Board - are the ones who must cough up the bucks.

The new arrangement won't change the state law that gives school boards wide discretion in deciding to what uses their state and local appropriations will be put. But at least the arrangement provides a method of outside control to make sure the schools are spending the money as they said they would when their budget was adopted.

Some measure of control is particularly needed in the county because of its ridiculous method for selecting School Board members. They are selected not by the supervisors but by a commission appointed by a judge appointed by the General Assembly. The absence of political accountability makes fiscal accountability all the more important.