THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 27, 1995 TAG: 9511230009
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
Students, teachers and parents who want Virginia Beach's Princess Anne High School to rise from the ashes even better than before it burned left City Hall happy the other day.
On their own, they have raised tens of thousands of dollars to refurbish the school above and beyond the $7 million insurance that will pay to restore the classrooms and other areas damaged in an arson fire Sept. 1. They were in City Council chambers Tuesday to encourage council to approve the use of $1.5 million from the schools' site-acquisition account to expand Princess Anne's library, cafeteria and space for arts programs.
City Council did approve that transfer of funds, and more power to citizens who band together to achieve a worthy goal. But Beach School Board member Robert Hall, the sole public official to vote against the $1.5 million expenditure, has a good point: A school system that ended fiscal year 1994-95 $12.1 million in deficit, and now faces a deficit of $8.6 million for 1995-96, ought to be very careful about dipping into existing accounts for unforeseen expenses. School officials' efforts to please students, parents and teachers despite fiscal constraints contributed mightily to the financial hole the school system's in.
Still, Virginia Beach could use some good news to raise sagging school spirits, and refocus attention on the many positive aspects of education in the city.And most of the School Board and all of City Hall are persuaded that this expenditure for Princess Anne will leave a -site-acquisition fund adequate to schools' needs. But the debate about it brings up another subject that warrants re-examination: the policies that produced the latest school-site acquisition, a $3.8 million new location for Linkhorn Elementary School.
In October 1994, the School Board offered an elderly widow $260,000 and three brothers $800,000 for their adjacent properties on First Colonial Road. In March 1995, the board ended up taking the widow's six acres, by condemnation, for $1 million. It paid $2.8 million for the brothers' nine acres. That meant the cost of the site alone consumed almost half the money budgeted to build the school. That, plus the unbuildability of nearly half the widow's property because it's wetlands, plus the need to condemn property at all when other landowners in the vicinity offered their parcels for far less, raise questions that critics of the purchase say the schools have yet to answer fully.
The bottom line, of course, is that Virginia Beach schools are in no position to be anything but frugal, in rebuilding burned schools or in constructing new schools or in staffing and equipping them. Frugal doesn't mean skinflint: It does mean getting good value for the money spent. The Princess Anne expansion seems to qualify. And if finding the funds for that expansion focuses attention on the schools' capital budget, so much the better. The CIP has yet to receive the scrutiny that the operating budget failed to withstand. by CNB