THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 9, 1995 TAG: 9508090399
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
A petition drive to let city voters decide whether to elect the School Board has fallen short of the signatures needed to put the issue on the November ballot.
Organizers vowed this week to continue their efforts.
``By no means are we giving up the ghost,'' said Ghent resident Donna Briggs, co-founder of Citizens for an Elected School Board.
Briggs said supporters armed with petitions will be stationed at the polls for the Nov. 7 general election. If they're successful, a referendum could be placed on the May 1996 election ballot.
``We're committed to continuing to work on this issue,'' said Briggs, who has three children in the city's school system. ``We're definitely not dropping it.''
Norfolk is the only city in the region in which the City Council still appoints members of the School Board.
Since Virginia's General Assembly in 1992 passed legislation allowing localities to have elected school boards, residents in every other city in Hampton Roads have voted for them.
Elected board members now are serving in Virginia Beach and Suffolk, and Portsmouth is scheduled to have its first election next year. Chesapeake is awaiting approval by the U.S. Justice Department of its voting districts.
Statewide, 97 of 136 localities with school boards - or 71 percent - now elect them, according to the Virginia School Boards Association.
Two previous petition efforts in Norfolk, organized by groups representing city school teachers, failed for lack of support.
The deadline for submitting petitions to get the issue on the November ballot is today, but Briggs said Tuesday that the drive was thousands of signatures short.
Briggs said she and fellow Ghent resident Ernie Edwards, her co-chairman on the citizen's committee, estimate that the drive has netted 2,500 signatures. They need about 8,400 signatures, 10 percent of the city's registered voters.
The effort began May 18, the date Briggs filed a notice with Norfolk's clerk of the Circuit Court to begin the petition drive. Under state law, the signatures must be collected within nine months of filing notice, or the effort must begin anew.
While the city's Federation of Civic Leagues has endorsed the petition drive, there doesn't appear to be a clear consensus on whether the School Board should be elected. Norfolk residents who phoned in their opinions recently at the invitation of The Virginian-Pilot were evenly divided.
Those who favored an election said it would give residents a greater voice in local government and make School Board members more accountable.
``With so much controversy about our educational system, I think elected School Board members would be much more responsive to the needs of the children,'' Flora Goldman said.
``I think Norfolk for too long has felt that we are just satisfied with whatever they do in the city,'' said Denise Darceline Harris, a social worker and mother of several children in high school. ``I think it's incorrect to think that. This is the '90s, and I think an elected School Board would be more concerned and sensitive to its constituents, if they knew that they would be voted on every so many years.''
Those who opposed the idea worried that educational needs would take a back seat to politics.
The Rev. James G. Cobb, who has a child at Blair Middle in Norfolk and one who graduated this year from Maury High, said his family moved to Norfolk from a city in Michigan where school board members are elected.
``The problem was always that people very much politicized it, and the loudest people who had the ego to run for office did so as a political thing,'' Cobb said. ``It did not serve the best interests of the community.''
KEYWORDS: NORFOLK SCHOOL BOARD by CNB