Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 30, 1993 TAG: 9307300236
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Terry says she's confident she could find enough money in the state budget to hire more teachers in certain localities.
Terry, speaking Thursday during a walking tour of a Roanoke housing project, offered no specifics about how much her plan would cost, how many localities would benefit or where the money would come from.
The point, she said, is to lay out the philosophy that would guide her in attacking Virginia's disparity in school funding, an issue that pits financially stressed rural and urban localities against the state's affluent suburbs.
"We know if children don't reach a certain level of skills by the third grade, they're going to be dropouts," Terry said. "You can pick out the dropouts in the third grade."
And the pupils most at risk tend to live in the state's poorest localities, she said.
That's why, Terry proposed, the state should provide poorer school systems with more money to hire more teachers to reduce the class sizes in kindergarten through third grade.
There should be no more than 21 pupils per teacher in those grades, Terry said. In some schools, she said, the class sizes reach into the high 20s.
That wouldn't solve the entire disparity issue, she acknowledged. However, "if you've got limited resources, it seems to me you take the rifle approach and target it. You can have a big impact."
(In Roanoke, the average class size in those grades already is 20 pupils, and the school administration wants to cut that to about 15, said Richard Kelley, executive for business affairs for the city's school system. But even in Roanoke, he said, there are some schools where the class size is higher.)
By concentrating on poor children in the earliest grades, Terry said, the state may save money later by reducing the number of dropouts and decreasing juvenile crime.
The crime issue served as a backdrop for Terry's remarks on education funding. Thursday, she spent an hour walking around the Lincoln Terrace housing project with three Roanoke police officers and the president of the project's residents' council to draw attention to her support for the city's "community policing" program there.
Terry - who has spent much of the young campaign sparring with Republican George Allen over who's tougher on crime - has pledged to talk up such programs throughout the state and, if possible, provide more money to localities to hire more police officers.
She's also vowed to make looking out for Virginia's children the centerpiece of her administration, which is how her talk on crime turned into a talk on improving schools.
Terry said she'll offer more details as the campaign goes on about how to make up the funding disparity between rich and poor schools, and hinted that she might talk about some during Saturday's debate with Allen before the Virginia Bar Association.
For now, a spokesman for Allen called Terry's proposal "weak."
To solve the disparity in school funding, "you have to do something more far-reaching than that," said Allen spokesman Ken Stroupe. He said Allen will institute "sweeping change in the central bureaucracy" in Richmond to cut wasteful spending that could be redirected to poorer school systems.
"It's the ultimate irony that Mary Sue Terry, after seven years in office [as attorney general], is now crisscrossing the state saying we have to change this and have to add that," the Allen spokesman said.
"She had the opportunity and she did not do it. Why should the people of Virginia believe that four years of Mary Sue Terry as governor will be any different from Mary Sue Terry as attorney general?"
The head of the coalition of school systems suing the state said Terry was right to concentrate on providing money to cut class sizes in lower grades. But Ken Walker, the Halifax County school superintendent, said the overriding issue is whether the state will change its basic funding formula.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB