DATE: Friday, May 9, 1997                   TAG: 9705090022

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B13  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Keith Monroe 

                                            LENGTH:   80 lines

VIRGINIA BEACH

Bismarck is credited with the remark that two things you don't want to watch being made are sausages and laws. This week in Virginia Beach, they weren't making either. But they were approaching the end of a stomach-turning attempt to craft a school budget.

In the process, City Council voted to restrict school spending to a fixed percentage of revenues and to demand that the School Board request a tax increase if it thought it needed more funds.

This begged several questions. Was the amount of money proposed as a base the right amount of money to provide a quality education? That was never really addressed. If more funds were needed by schools, was the only solution to raise taxes, as the city assumed? Couldn't non-school spending be cut? Not according to the logic of the revenue-sharing straitjacket.

Much of this long wrangle is now moot. City Council is poised to pass a budget that does not raise the property tax and that gives schools about 97 percent of the $422 million originally requested. Still unanswered is whether that's the right amount of money to fund schools adequately. There's the suspicion that if the School Board had taken the blame for a tax increase it would have gotten more cash.

Unfortunately, the debate has been about big numbers, taxes, personalities, ideology and power. It rarely has been about education. Will the city spend enough to do right by special-ed students, gifted and talented students, kids who aren't headed for college who need apprenticeship programs to find gainful employment? Hard to tell.

Most educational research suggests the best things schools can do are start educating early, especially at-risk kids, and keep the teacher-student ratio as low as possible in the early grades. Will the proposed budget do enough to address those issues? How about technology? Are the schools competitive on that emerging front, or woefully behind, as critics argue?

Rather than answer such questions, the budget process obscured or ignored them. Generally, a budget is hammered out by people sitting around a table who reach a compromise between unlimited aspirations and limited resources. In theory, the School Board is supposed to craft a budget and justify it to those who must allocate the funds. But the Virginia Beach process was conducted in an atmosphere so politicized and so acrimonious that a rational assessment of needs and resources took a back seat.

Along the way, a prominent member of City Council used the word ``despise'' in expressing a view of the School Board. Each body accused the other of trying to micromanage schools. Members of each said the other body couldn't be trusted.

Some council members say the schools presented a take-it-or-leave-it budget and refused to make the effort to sell the increase. Some on the school side say council made up its mind in advance and any attempt at persuasion was futile.

Some GOP members of Virginia Beach's General Assembly delegation urged members of both the board and the council not to raise taxes for any reason, regardless of the merits of the case.

Suspicion was expresssed that the gifted and talented program was being held hostage to guarantee funds for less popular programs.

At one point, a city budgeteer muttered that an awful lot of kids were qualifying for special ed and wondered if the criteria couldn't be re-examined? The implication was plain. Since special-ed students are expensive to educate, raising the bar to exclude more from services could lower costs. But bean counters stray from their area of expertise when they start deciding which dyslexics are worth educating. People aren't beans.

Politics was omnipresent. Some School Board members, after serving for less than a year and with no triumphs yet to display, are said to have set their sights on higher office. Did fear of having their careers short-circuited by the tax-and-spend label influence their votes? That's one rumor.

Some council members are said to have cast a highly visible vote for increased school funding only after concluding it wouldn't actually pass and without pushing for it in private.

Playwright George S. Kaufman, noted wit and hypochondriac, once expressed chagrin that his doctor was out playing golf. He said he wanted the kind of doctor who, when he wasn't treating patients, was studying the latest medical journal.

Virginia Beach voters would be better served if City Council and the School Board, when they aren't passing budgets, are studying ways to improve the schools. Not playing politics. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot.

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