Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 20, 1993 TAG: 9311200078
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Fingers busy flipping through law books. Fingers dialing phones, returning calls to puzzled school board attorneys. And fingers typing opinion after opinion in response to localities that can't figure out how to replace appointed school board members with elected ones - without breaking the law.
"It's almost impossible to give you any general rules," said Senior Assistant Attorney General Roger Wiley. "I've talked to county attorneys from 25 to 30 localities. Each one has a different situation."
Wiley has been issuing opinions ever since the first 42 localities voted to switch to elected school boards last year. Mass confusion arose after Election Day 1992 when cities and counties tried to make sense of the laws governing how to make the transition.
Another 35 localities followed suit this year, and the laws are no clearer to them.
"We're getting another group [of questions] now from this last election," said Wiley.
So is Frank Barham, executive director of the Virginia School Board Association. He's been fielding half a dozen calls daily from school board members and superintendents, plus two or three invitations a week to speak.
"It's just steady and increasing," he said. "I keep telling them, `It's not your problem. Stay out of it.' "
The problem, said Barham, falls in the laps of the local governing bodies.
Under Virginia law, school board elections must coincide - district by district - with elections for members of city councils or boards of supervisors. But in many localities, those terms don't match. Nor does the number of members on both boards always match.
In some cases, the answers are easy. One question Roanoke County Attorney Paul Mahoney is asking, for example, is whether a locality can cut short the term of an appointed member in order to replace that person with an elected member.
Absolutely, said Wiley.
"There's nothing wrong with cutting an appointed term short in order to comply with a statute," he said.
That's good news for Botetourt County, which has laid out a plan in which three School Board members will lose time off their appointed terms. Because supervisors from the Blue Ridge, Fincastle and Valley districts come up for election in 1995, so must the School Board members in those districts - all of whom were appointed to serve until 1996 or 1997.
But other questions are not so simple. In Montgomery County, for example, terms for two School Board seats - for the towns of Christiansburg and Blacksburg - don't coincide with district terms for the Board of Supervisors, which has seven members to the School Board's nine.
Wiley said during a seminar last month that the towns could not continue to have double representation, because they already are included in the county's seven election districts.
But he has not yet issued a written opinion on the matter, and Assistant School Superintendent John Martin said the county won't act without one.
"We're just sitting tight waiting for that information to come back," he said.
Martin said he's still unclear whether the seats "become at-large or disappear or what. When the lawyers can't figure it out, I leave it alone."
Several other localities are having the same problem, but Wiley said he can't issue one opinion for all of them, because the situations aren't exactly the same.
Mahoney said Roanoke County faces a more complicated challenge than other localities, because it is one of only two counties in the state with a charter. The charter outlines how the county must select its School Board members, and in order to change that process, the charter likewise must change. That requires an act of the General Assembly.
To further complicate matters, not everyone agrees on how Roanoke County should make the transition from appointed to elected boards. The Board of Supervisors took steps this week to put all five seats up for election in 1995, with some terms running for two years and others for four during the transition period.
School Board Chairman Frank Thomas said that could lead to a completely inexperienced board and "the ruination and the downfall" of the county school system - a position one supervisor agrees with.
Windsor Hills District Supervisor Lee Eddy, who cast the lone dissenting vote, said he would prefer to elect two School Board members in 1995 and the other three in 1997 so experienced members would remain to help inexperienced ones.
The Board of Supervisors chose to implement a fully elected School Board in 1995, rather than in stages, because voters so clearly wanted an elected School Board, Supervisors Chairman Fuzzy Minnix said.
County residents will have the opportunity to speak on the matter at a public hearing Dec. 14.
Barham said the uncertainty isn't likely to end any time soon. Once localities determine how they want to make the change and whether or not it's legal, they still have another step to take before they can go to the polls.
"The plan must go to the Justice Department," he said, to ensure that it doesn't discriminate against minorities. "That could delay things even further."
by CNB