Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 9, 1993 TAG: 9312100295
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Tuesday night, board members heard what amounts to the Hyundai of spending schemes for 1994-95: efficient, no frills and no major new initiatives.
Still, the $44.7 million draft is $2 million more than the current spending plan, a 4.8 p
ercent jump caused primarily by the cost of opening a new elementary school in western Blacksburg.
But the Montgomery Board of Supervisors, which has a small revenue surplus to toy with this year, cannot rest easy yet.
The Hyundai will be getting an upgrade.
Superintendent of Schools Herman Bartlett said he will present his recommended budget to the School Board on Jan. 4.
The document presented Tuesday was only a starting point, school officials stressed, to show board members how much it would cost just to keep things going as they are now.
Bartlett's proposal, on the other hand, could include new initiatives from among a list of 154 budget requests the school system has received this year. If they were all funded, they would total $21 million, which is half the current operating budget. Officials developed the list in part from a series of public meetings the School Board held across the county this fall.
School Board members also will get a chance to add to or subtract from the budget in a series of work sessions and a public hearing they will hold before forwarding their proposal to the Board of Supervisors by Feb. 1. The supervisors generally set next year's tax rate and adopt the budget by the end of March.
One of the key areas that may be added to the bare-bones budget is a proposed new salary schedule to even out the percentage change between levels on the pay scale and to try to improve Montgomery's competitiveness with surrounding school divisions.
Implementing the new teacher's scale beginning in July would cost an additional $2.9 million, school officials said.
The salary plan has the backing of the Montgomery County Education Association. Earlier this fall, School Board members agreed to use the salary plan as a building block for next year's budget, but without committing to its specifics.
Some of the items that would drive the 4.8 percent increase include:
Fixed costs required to keep services at their current quality, such as increases in health insurance premiums, the cost of an early retirement program and providing free textbooks for all children.
The cost of opening the new elementary school under construction on Prices Fork Road near the Hethwood subdivision. Instructional and building costs combined will cost $726,300, with 26 percent of that in one-time expenses.
In other business Tuesday, Andrew Cohill, an official with the Blacksburg Electronic Village project, briefed the board on attempts to bring the computer communications network to all county schools sometime during 1994.
Cohill said he is seeking a grant to pay for a high-speed data link that would bring the schools outside the immediate Blacksburg area into the network.
Initially, school officials thought this could be done without charge, but that turned outnot to be the case. Cohill said he is confident he could find a funding source by the summer.
Board members, meanwhile, were curious about what benefit the village would offer students, and what would be done to restrict what information schoolchildren would have access to through their computers.
Cohill said students would be able to develop their reading and writing skills by communicating with other students via electronic mail. Moreover, the system could facilitate communication between parents and teachers.
As for censorship, board member David Moore said the electronic village would offer children access to the whole world via the Internet, an international computer network with thousands of users. School officials may lack any way of controlling that access, he said.
Cohill said the project's leaders are sensitive to the needs of schoolchildren. While Virginia Tech, partners with Blacksburg and C&P Telephone Co. in the enterprise, is not in the business of censorship, Cohill said it's important to start a dialogue between parents and school officials so they will know what will be available.
Moore said later he assumes that students could be given restricted access that would prohibit them from linking into areas of the Internet that have adult themes that would be unacceptable in a school.
by CNB