Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 18, 1990 TAG: 9004180482
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Geoff Seamans/associate editor
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Half the money is to come out of the schools' 1990-91 fiscal hide; in effect, this constitutes the transfer of a current operating cost to a future budget. And the immediate $500,000 bailout from the county supervisors came at the cost of the schools' loss of control over their own accounts.
The episode is instructive, and about more than the issue of who gets to count the schools' beans. It's a window on a larger problem, the condition of public education in the county - and, for that matter, the county itself.
I wish that county residents who oppose consolidation with Roanoke City would dare peer through the window. The result might be a less pollyannish view of the future of their county and their schools.
County schools are good. In several readily measurable categories, they're ahead of Roanoke City schools: a seven- instead of six-period high-school day; full- instead of half-day kindergarten; slightly higher teacher pay (enough to help in recruiting); slightly more spending per student (at least if federal money is excluded).
But long-term trends are not encouraging.
Maybe it's an exaggeration to say that county schools aren't as good as they used to be. It's no exaggeration to note, though, that the county is finding it increasingly difficult to fund the sorts of programs that would keep its schools first-rate.
Meanwhile, city schools seem to be getting better. Granted, some of it is playing catch-up. But signs of improvement are impressive when you take into account the diversity of the population - the city contains both the most and least affluent neighborhoods in the Roanoke Valley - served by city schools.
This year wasn't the first example of money troubles in the county schools. As education writer Patricia Lopez Baden reported in an April 8 news story, recent years have seen a number of program cutbacks. They have ranged from elimination of a grade-school art program to reduced support for honors students to attend the Governor's School for Math and Science.
Is grade-school art absolutely essential? No. Neither is sending first-rate students to the Governor's School for advanced work. But such things contribute to the level of school quality that historically has been the pride of the county.
Why, then, is the quality of county schools so frequently extolled, and so frequently held up as good cause to resist merging the county government with the city government?
One reason, I suspect, is that old ways of thinking, like old habits, die hard. If the county schools were clearly better than the city schools 10 or 15 years ago, the assumption might be, then it must also hold true today.
Another reason, I suspect, is confusion over what constitutes a good school system. If the measure of school quality is the social and economic homogeneity of a given classroom, rather than how well that classroom meets the needs of given children within it, then the county could sink to the state's minimum standards and still be "better."
A third reason, I suspect, is that county school officials have worked hard to stave off the inevitable. That's to their credit, but this year's fiasco is a classic example of the limitations of creative budgeting. Juggling funds from one account to another, sticking operating items in the capital budget, deferring routine maintenance - such things do not work indefinitely.
The county is no more immune than the city to the problems created by declining enrollment, stiffer state mandates, competition for money from non-education activities of local government, the need to avoid ungodly increases in local taxation.
And in at least one important respect, the county is less immune than the city. It's residential, not commercial, real estate that produces the need for schools and thus for the taxes to operate the schools. The county's tax base is 84 percent residential; the city's, only 40 percent.
That helps explain why the city's real-estate tax rate has declined steadily, to $1.25 per $100 of assessed value, while the county's has risen steadily, to $1.15.
The county supervisors have voted to reduce it to $1.13 for 1990-91, but that's a joke. It does nothing to reverse the long-range school-funding problems, and the rate almost surely will have to go back up next year or the year after that.
Nevertheless, some county residents seem to view proposed city-county merger as an effort by the city to grab the county's tax base.
That makes no sense. Certainly, there are good reasons for the city to want merger with the county. But picking up a net-loss tax base isn't one of them.
Actually, it's the other way around. It's the county that is (or ought to be) trying to tap into the city's more lucrative tax base.
Many county residents also seem to assume that consolidation threatens a status quo they've come to like. In a way, of course, it does.
But the budget overruns of the county schools might lead some to re-examination that assumption. If by status quo is meant top-notch schools at relatively low tax rates, the graver danger to the county may lie in letting slip an opportunity to merge with the city.
by CNB