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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 15, 1995                   TAG: 9503150028
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI                                LENGTH: Medium

PULASKI SCHOOL BUDGET CALLS FOR $500,000 MORE FROM COUNTY

The proposed budget, which shows an overall increase of more than $1.4 million, has already been scaled back. Originally, the school administration thought it would need an extra $2.5 million to cover all its needs.

The schools will likely ask for a total of $8.3 million from the county out of a $25.4 million overall budget. The rest of the money will come from state and federal sources.

The School Board outlined its preliminary budget at a joint meeting with the county Board of Supervisors Monday night. A more formal joint session will follow in April, after the School Board holds a public hearing on its proposed budget.

The supervisors also reappointed Carolyn Brown and Lewis Pratt to new School Board terms from the Cloyd and Draper Districts, respectively. Neither had any competition.

Their present terms expire June 30, and their new ones will last only until this year's elections. Pulaski County is switching from supervisor appointments to direct election of board members this year.

Superintendent Bill Asbury told the supervisors that the preliminary budget includes a 4.5 percent raise for teachers and 3.5 percent raise for administrative and support personnel. The teachers raise would be the biggest single item, since 83 percent of the school budget is composed of salaries and fringe benefits.

Other components include increasing pay for employees who supervise student activities, adding two buses to the fleet, making an architectural study of school building needs, continuing to reduce the number of pupils per class in the lower grades, increasing the funding for staff development, and adding two health nurses for elementary and middle schools.

The school system now has just one nurse, stationed at Pulaski County High School. But in recent years, Pulaski County and other localities have found that the health needs of their students are changing. More of them require medications for everything from allergies to behavior control.

Currently, many of the medications must be given by school office personnel and, even with two more nurses, that will still often be the case. Karen Clymer, coordinator of pupil personnel services, said that more than 200 medications are administered on any given day throughout the school system.

These include about 38 for general allergies, 21 for allergies to bees, 20 for seizure disorders, 16 for cardiac conditions, eight for migraines, 25 to those with orthopedic or physical impairment problems and 11 for diabetes.

More than 175 more medications are given for attention deficit or attention hyperactivity disorders, she said. All these are in addition to medications that might be needed for special education students.

Clymer said each school has at least two employees who are certified in first aid and cardio-pulmonary resuscitation techniques.

``This is something our people have been asking for, for some time,'' Asbury said of the additional nurses. ``Health care has to come to the kids, rather than the kids coming to health care.''

In other business Monday night, the supervisors appointed Assistant County Administrator Peter Huber as their representative to the regional jail authority now being formed with Grayson and Giles counties and the city of Radford.