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

DATE: FRIDAY, March 13, 1992                   TAG: 9203130443
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARK LAYMAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

COUNTY SCHOOL WORKERS TO GET 3% RAISE

Unlike this budget year - when county schools were rocked by a $1.9 million cut in state funding - there will be enough money in the 1992-1993 budget to give the system's 1,800 employees a 3 percent raise, Superintendent Bayes Wilson told the School Board on Thursday.

It's "not our dream raise," the president-elect of the Roanoke County Education Association, Becky Deaton, told the School Board.

But she said the county's 1,000 teachers were glad that the School Board had kept its promise to make a pay raise a priority.

Despite grim warnings in recent months of another year of frozen salaries, "I knew they were going to do what they could," she said.

"We have a lot to be thankful for," School Board Chairman Frank Thomas said after hearing Wilson's budget projections. "Thank goodness the legislature and the governor did see fit to restore what they'd taken out [this year]."

But, he said, the increase in state funding next year only brings the school system "back to square one. We still have a lot of ground to make up."

Employees could have gotten an even bigger raise but for an increase in health insurance premiums. The school system's finance man, Jerry Hardy, said premiums probably will go up $800,000 - a 30 percent increase.

Due mostly to an increase in state funding, the proposed school operating budget of $66.1 million is nearly $2.9 million above this year's.

It includes $32.7 million in local money - the same as this year's budget.

The General Assembly approved the county's request to impose a 10-cent per pack tax on cigarettes, which County Administrator Elmer Hodge earlier said would raise $400,000 a year. To win support for that tax, the Board of Supervisors agreed to give that money to the school system next year.

However, Wilson said Thursday that the actual take from the tax would be lower, because of collection costs and uncertainty over whether taxes collected in Vinton would go to the town or to the county.

So to be on the safe side, he said, the 1992-1993 school budget includes no money from the cigarette tax.

Money from the tax could be used to pay insurance premiums if costs are higher than expected, Hardy said. Or it could be used to give school employees a slightly bigger raise.

But the Board of Supervisors probably would frown on that, because Hodge is proposing that county government employees get only a 3 percent raise, too.

Fearing further state funding cuts, the School Board had been holding onto $569,000 left over from the 1990-1991 budget year. Wilson said that money now could be used to replace leaky roofs, buy seven or eight school buses and hire an architect to plan renovations to Cave Spring Junior High School.

Wilson also is proposing that the School Board borrow $1.8 million from the Virginia Public School Authority next year for a variety of capital improvements - mostly roof replacements. "We need to move ahead with our high priority capital improvements regardless of whether the county has a bond issue," he said.

The Board of Supervisors is weighing whether to ask voters to approve a capital improvements bond issue this fall.

The School Board is scheduled to meet with the Board of Supervisors on March 24. It probably will approve the school budget two days later.