ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 21, 1997 TAG: 9704210022
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: FINCASTLE
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM THE ROANOKE TIMES
Jack Thomas' top priority is to raise teachers' salaries to a level competitive with other systems in the Roanoke Valley.
Jack Thomas showed up for work in Botetourt County nearly three months ago, but his nautical maps of the Chesapeake Bay and a pile of framed pictures are still stacked against his office walls.
The new Botetourt County school superintendent is a fan of fine food - he's a reader of Bon Appetit magazine - but he hasn't spent enough time in the Roanoke Valley to find a decent place to eat yet. He hasn't found any good fishing holes to whip his fly rod into, either.
Every Friday, the 48-year-old Thomas shows up at work with his car packed and ready to return to Appomattox where his wife and two children will live until the end of the school year.
The former Appomattox County superintendent said he's still too new to Botetourt to know what the answers are to its school woes.
"I don't even know what the questions are," he said. "I know a few."
But Thomas is not without priorities.
At the top of the list: raising teachers' salaries to a level competitive with other systems in the Roanoke Valley.
In Appomattox, Thomas said, employees' salaries were increased by 20 percent in his five years there. The system went from 95th on the list of starting teacher pay in Virginia to 35th.
His reputation as an open-eared teacher's superintendent and a self-described "compromiser," coupled with his visibility in the county's 11 schools - he's visited some of them twice - is already making him popular among the teachers.
"He's been open to the suggestions of teachers and ways of doing things we haven't been able to discuss before," said Botetourt Education Association President Lois Switzer. "It's definitely a change of pace."
Thomas was preceded by 15-year superintendent Clarence McClure, who retired last year, and interim superintendent Robert Reece.
School Board Chairwoman Sally Eads called Thomas "a listener" who operates on the idea that people perform well if you treat them well. She said she likes Thomas' habit of coming out from behind his desk and reclining in a rocking chair when he has visitors.
Though he was a teacher for only 31/2 years before becoming an assistant principal at age 28, Thomas' mother was a teacher, and so is his wife, Ruth.
His father climbed out of a youth as a coal miner in Pennsylvania, breaking the family cycle, to become a high school principal.
"I don't know that I wanted to be an educator when I grew up," Thomas said. He went to college at the University of South Carolina with more interest in sports than academics, and figured he might become a teacher and a coach.
His first teaching job was in Portsmouth. That lasted six months, but it was enough to hook him on the profession, he said.
He got his shot at coaching baseball in Valdosta, Ga., before he came back to Virginia to teach in Chesterfield County.
After a year there, he went for an interview for what he thought was the baseball coaching job and wound up as an assistant principal. He worked as an administrator in several Virginia systems and earned a master's degree in Asian history and a doctorate in education before landing the Appomattox job five years ago.
Switzer said she recently ran into some teachers from Appomattox at a Virginia Education Association meeting. "You're the ones that got our superintendent," they all said when they found out she was from Botetourt.
If he does in Botetourt what he did with the salary scale in Appomattox, Switzer and her colleagues may come to fear his departure from Botetourt.
Some critics of the school board's emphasis on raising salaries say Botetourt's pay is comparable to similar counties, like Rockbridge or Alleghany, but Thomas doesn't buy that.
"I think we need to be able to compete with the Roanoke Valley," he said. At $24,999, starting pay in Botetourt is an average of over $2,000 less than in Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem.
It's those systems that Botetourt competes with for teachers, Thomas said. If they want the best teachers in Botetourt, they have to be able to offer similar pay to lure some of them from those systems.
"We're going to start chunking away at it until we're competitive," he said.
Beyond pay, Thomas wants to put more money into instructional supplies and technology.
He envisions one day having at least four up-to-date computers in every classroom, all networked together, with Internet access. Those goals are all compatible with the board's vision, Eads said.
Thomas seems confident that the money will come, too. All the new industry in Botetourt will eventually benefit everybody, including the schools, he said.
Getting that money out of the board of supervisors is another problem altogether. Every spring, the supervisors or council members in just about every locality in Virginia wrangle over school funding.
It's been especially intense in Botetourt this year, with the School Board requesting a 34.5 percent increase in local funding and the supervisors only willing to give up an additional 11 percent.
Budget battles are nothing new to Thomas, who earned high marks from the Appomattox School Board for his willingness to "take the heat" and fight the supervisors there for what he believed the schools needed.
The only way the annual budget melee will probably ever come to an end is if Virginia's school boards are given the right to tax - a right boards in most other states already have.
Thomas thinks it's inevitable in Virginia, too.
"I can't say when," he said. "But that's what happens when you start electing school boards."
Until then, Thomas said he will get by on his belief in compromise.
"But don't think I don't want everything that I want."
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN/THE ROANOKE TIMES. Jack Thomas, formerly ofby CNBAppomattox, is the new Botetourt County school superintendent.