State Budget Finale?

Rob Jones penned it best this afternoon, “I hate it that education funding has become such a partisan issue.” I agree with Rob. Why does the basic funding for education have to be such a partisan issue? In Virginia, the House of Delegates is ruled by the Republican Party. Their leader in the House is our very own Morgan Griffith, son of a teacher. In the Virginia Senate, the Democrats have a very slim majority. Of course, Governor Kaine is a Democrat as well. The Senate has looked after the education system in the past few years with strong leaders from both main parties leading the way. Governor Kaine ran for the office on a pro-public school education banner. Yet year in and year out, funding for education becomes a battle for the children and teachers in the Commonwealth.

The final budget compromise between the House and Senate has been broken along party lines. In the end, Kaine and company won concessions from the House on the Standards of Quality (SOQ) funding (huge for us!) and teacher salaries. After the House was forced, thanks to teachers flooding the electronic and traditional mailboxes of legislators, to give in on the SOQ issue, they sought to penalize the teachers by refusing to provide ANY support for teacher pay raises in the two-year budget cycle, while attempting to bolster the raises already planned for state employees. The Senate always had language for the state share of a 2% teacher pay raise in the second year of the budget. In the end, the Senate version prevailed, and the House positions passed into the wind.

Some might argue that the pay raise is weak. After all, it is only the state share of a 2% raise when we all know that most localities need so much more support than that. However, what is different about this state share is that it runs concurrently with the school year. It begins in July of 2009 as opposed to December of 2009 as has been recent tradition. Effectively, this means that the state will really be supporting teacher pay raises for their legitimate share for the first time in memory. Keep in mind that the state share of any pay raise is about 33-36% if it’s paid over the course of the entire school year. In the past, the state would trumpet a 3% pay raise for teachers, but would only supply their share (33-36%) for six months.

So all in all, this has been an incredible year at the General Assembly for teachers. The Standards of Quality will reach full funding for the first time in recent memory. Although there are still teaching positions that localities have to fund completely out of pocket without state assistance, the budget compromise of 2008 alone will bring about $8-$9 million in NEW money into our local school division. The funding for teacher salaries in the second year of the budget may well assist us next year in getting at least a minimal raise. All of this was accomplished in a General Assembly that was getting wet from the dark , stormy clouds of economic turmoil.

We owe this success to the persistence of the teachers across the state who flooded the General Assembly with emails and letters. Thank you! We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Rob Jones and Doris Boitnott at VEA. Without them and their staff, teachers in Virginia would be left with empty gas tanks.

The State of the Budget

The State of the Budget

The school board budget summit on March 6 was an exhaustive session that delved into every nook and cranny of the 2008-09 school budget.

The school board meeting got off to a fine start when news broke (thanks to Rob Jones of VEA) that the House of Delegates has withdrawn their myopic education funding scheme that would have effectively band-aided the state’s budget on the financial back of public school education. However, the news wasn’t all cheery. Seemingly as retribution for their “concession”, the House ripped any support for teacher raises from the biennial budget. In fact, more support for state employee raises was factored back in as support for teacher raises was erased. This issue is not dead. We will not lie down(or lay down for that matter) and will continue demanding state support for teacher compensation.

It had become apparent to RCEA members who have attended recent school board meetings that the RCEA salary proposal, where we asked for a 4% across the board raise and a scale adjustment of 1%, was being taken seriously. However, it didn’t seem to be carrying the support needed for passage. There was also some differing financial information regarding how much our proposal would cost. Considering that and in order to preserve the greatest possible raise for our employees, we withdrew the scale adjustment language in exchange for flipping the cash from that scale adjustment provision back to our across the board proposal. We did clearly make the point, however, that the Roanoke County teacher compensation scale is weak in the middle steps and will need to be dealt with in the future.

It would be irresponsible to announce a final salary percentage at this time since the state and locality have not finalized their budgets, but there is broad consensus that school employees will be able to receive a healthy raise this year. The coming years, after the new money from the recent real estate tax reassessments flows through, may end up being a more difficult climate for pushing through any kind of raise. We will have to fight that battle at that time.

We must also guard against the Roanoke County’s supervisors dropping the real estate tax rate. A one or two penny drop could seriously affect new monies coming to the school system and consequentially any potential raise we may enjoy. We will continue monitoring their deliberations and seek meetings with the supervisors to let them know our needs as Roanoke County’s largest employee group.

So by and large…the state of public school education in Roanoke County is good right now.