DATE: Thursday, October 23, 1997            TAG: 9710230012
SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B10  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: BY JAMES WHEATON 

                                            LENGTH:   95 lines

PROBLEMS WITH GILMORE'S TEACHER PLAN

As a longtime School Board member in Chesapeake, you might expect me to be thrilled with Jim Gilmore's pledge to provide 4,000 new elementary schoolteachers. However, after a review of the available information about the Gilmore plan, the fact is that the plan actually offers much less than Mr. Gilmore promises.

Assume for the moment that Mr. Gilmore is elected and that he finds the funds and political support to carry out his new teacher pledge. Also assume that all of these ``new'' teachers are in addition to those that Chesapeake and the rest of the state would hire simply as a matter of growth (the promise to reduce class size would be meaningless if he is trying to count teachers we would hire anyway). If that's the case, Chesapeake would be entitled to at least 140 new teachers, which amounts to 5 per school for our existing 28 elementary schools. In fact, Chesapeake would probably be entitled to more than 140 new teachers because we will open new schools before the Gilmore plan is fully phased in and because Chesapeake's elementary schools are probably larger than the average elementary school around the state.

In an ideal world, all of these new teachers would be welcome. In the real world, Chesapeake's parents and other taxpayers should be concerned:

1. The Gilmore plan would be an unfunded mandate requiring substantial additional local funds.

Many voters probably do not realize that when the state offers a new educational program, the local taxpayer bears a substantial portion of the cost. For instance, we receive from the state each year only a fraction of the cost of our teachers' salaries and benefits. In the current year in Chesapeake, the state fraction equals about 71 percent of the cost of a brand-new teacher and 57 percent of the cost of an average Chesapeake teacher (excluding advanced degree and activity supplements paid completely out of local funds). Even if we assume that every new teacher provided by the Gilmore plan will be brand new, the additional annual local taxpayer cost to pay for these new teachers would be nearly $1.5 million. Of course, that amount would not include any of the additional operating costs that would be needed to equip a new teacher and his or her classroom.

2. The Gilmore plan provides money for teachers but ignores the need for classrooms.

Chesapeake does not have classrooms for 140 new elementary teachers, and many other communities around the state face similar space shortages. In Chesapeake, the capital cost of providing 140 new classrooms - which is the equivalent of about four full elementary schools, excluding special-education classrooms - could be more than $50 million in current dollars. I would prefer to see the candidates for governor debating ways to provide state funding for school construction - Virginia is one of a few states that provide nothing at all - rather than a new state mandate that will impose millions of dollars of newly unfunded capital costs.

3. The Gilmore plan does not target smaller class sizes where they are needed most.

A recent story about school class sizes in a major national newsmagazine referred to substantial research which shows that smaller class sizes do not provide identical benefits to all children. Mr. Gilmore touts his promise to give ``about five teachers'' to every elementary school, but the fact is that we don't need these teachers in every school. Just as Chesapeake (as well as the state) has targeted existing class-size reduction programs for schools that have the highest proportion of economically disadvantaged students (whom studies indicate will benefit most from smaller classes), any new program should be designed carefully to meet actual needs. Instead, Mr. Gilmore has placed on the table a plan that appears to be designed to convince all of us that every school will receive new teachers.

4. The Gilmore plan cannot ensure that new teachers will be as qualified as our existing teachers.

The plan assumes a substantial short-term expansion of teacher hiring around the state; but even if all of the new teachers are immediately available in our applicant pool, we will have to dig deeper into that pool than we do now. When this quality concern is combined with the Gilmore campaign theme that teachers need not be paid more than they now receive, it could become difficult for school systems to ensure that they can attract enough new teachers who will be as qualified as we would like them to be. Moreover, we cannot be confident that flooding our classrooms with new, inexperienced and underpaid teachers will yield the test-score improvements and other results for which the Gilmore plan is ostensibly designed.

Don't get me wrong. If Mr. Gilmore is proposing that Chesapeake receive an additional $3.4 million per year in state school funding, I'd like to have it. The state has long been derelict in its constitutional responsibility to fund local schools, and the new funding could help address the growing deficit between the state's education obligations and its existing funding practices. But if Mr. Gilmore really shares my desire to use new state funds to improve our schools - including their test scores - he should leave the methods to local school board members and administrators. We should have the flexibility to use a variety of tools, including instructional technology, better teacher pay, more resource teachers, tutoring and parent involvement programs, as well as class size initiatives, to do our jobs. Mr. Gilmore's one-size-fits-all plan does not give us any flexibility, would introduce new funding and other problems and, if our capital needs remain unaddressed, will simply turn out to be an empty promise. MEMO: Jim Wheaton has served on the Chesapeake School Board since 1991,

and practices law in Norfolk.

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