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board meeting got off to a fine start when news broke (thanks to Rob Jones of VEA) that the House of Delegates has withdrawn their myopic education funding scheme that would have effectively band-aided the state’s budget on the financial back of public school education.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.