School Board Newsletter, January 30, 1998

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Subject: School Board Newsletter
Date: 98-01-30 12:28:33 EST
From: James.C.Klagge@bev.net (James C. Klagge)
To: "School Issues List"@vt.edu

Dear Friends,

Hope you survived the sudden snow. Schools are finally back in business today.

1. Discipline Report. Last year, in response to concerns from parents about perceived inequities in the administration of discipline in the schools, the board commissioned a study to be done. Though it has been a long time in coming, it will be presented to the board at its meeting Tuesday, Feb. 3rd at 7:30pm at the School Board Office. To some extent the delays were due to the importance and difficulty of being sure the data was exactly right. I hope this report is the first step in a productive process for dealing with this issue.

2. Benefits for Part-time Staff. As long as I have been on the board I have heard about the desire of bus drivers for benefits. Aides and other part-time workers also have this concern. There seemed to be a real desire by the board to address this issue this year. However, it has turned out to be incredibly expensive and therefore frustrating. I'll try to present the issue without getting bogged down in details. Health insurance for drivers would cost $215,000/yr (=24% compensation increase), and for aides would cost $300,000/yr (=24% compensation increase). VRS retirement would cost $86,000/yr for drivers (=10% compensation increase) and $200,000/yr for aides (=13% compensation increase). We thought perhaps we could start by offering just retirement. But VRS requires that you offer retirement only to employees deemed to be "full-time", and requires that full-time employees also receive health insurance. We are allowed to define what the drivers and aides do as full-time, but if we do, then anyone, including cafeteria workers who work as much must also be included as full-time and offered the full range of benefits. Suddenly we are talking about nearly a million dollars! Mary North had the idea that perhaps we could offer benefits only to those who had already been on the job for three years--thus cutting down the pool. But this turns out to be illegal. There can't be more than a one-year waiting period. So we seem to be stymied by equity laws that basically require all-or-nothing. And since we cannot afford all, they are left with nothing.

One possibility would be to use the total amount of new money for compensation for all employees sought in our budget (average 5% raise = $2.1 million) and allocate half of that to securing benefits for part-time people. That makes it do-able. But it amounts to giving full-time people, including teachers, a 2.5% increase, and part-time people a roughly 35% compensation increase! But without a mandate from the full-time staff to do this, I can't see it. I hope you can understand our frustration over this. Certainly aides and bus drivers and other part-time staff are very important to the running of schools and the education of children--but I don't see where we can go with this.

The administration is going to continue to look into this, and if there are any benefits experts out there who can offer any advice, we'd be glad to hear about it. In lieu of these expensive benefits, we did add disability insurance for part-time people to our budget proposal, but that is a very small benefit indeed.

3. Budget Proposal. As noted in the newspaper today, last night the school board approved a budget proposal to be sent to the supervisors for their consideration. The proposal asks for about $5.2 million in new money, which constitutes about a 9.8% increase, for a total of about $58 million. I will talk more about this in future newsletters. The board adopted this budget proposal unanimously. It is the end result of a budget process that began with needs and requests estimated to cost an additional $8.9 million. Board members are prepared to speak about and on behalf of this budget request to PTA's and other school or community groups. You can contact me or your board member directly. I have listed the e-mail addresses below:

Tina McPherson- District A- tdmcp@bev.net
Bernie Jortner- District B- bjortner@vt.edu
Wat Hopkins- Vice Chair & District G-whopkins@vt.edu
Michael Smith- District E- msmith2@bev.net
David McCrumb- District C- dmccrumb@vt.edu
Mary North- District D- mhnorth@bev.net
Jim Klagge- Chair & District F- jklagge@bev.net
The Superintendent is Fred Morton- fmorton@bev.net

4. Early Releases for Elementary Planning Time. It has been important to me, since being on the board, to increase planning time for elementary school teachers. They have traditionally had less than secondary teachers, and certainly less than they needed, especially in light of new state mandated curricula. My first year on the borad I proposed handling it financially by hiring extra aides to cover for planning time, but room was not found in the budget for that. Last year the administration proposed a series of 12 extra early release days as a solution that would not cost the schools more. Obviously it imposes costs and hassles on the parents. I stand behind the need for this time, but I am willing to hear feedback on this strategy. In particular, I'd like to hear suggestions for other ways to handle this if you are unsatisfied with the way it is handled now.

5. Goals. One of the items on our agenda for Tuesday is for each board member, and the superintendent, to set out their goals for the system this year and coming years. We will use this material at our retreat in February to discuss some strategies and plans. The retreat will be at the Patrick Henry Hotel in Roanoke, Feb. 20-21, and is open to the public.

Thanks for your interest in schools.

-Jim Klagge
School Board Chair

p.s., If you do not wish to be on this mailing list, please let me know and I will remove you.

email: admin@gisone.com