School Board Newsletter #58, May 6, 1999

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Subj: School Issues Newsletter #58
Date: 5/6/99 10:44:16 AM EST
From: jklagge@bev.net (Jim Klagge)

Dear Friends,
Some brief items:
1) Four seats on the school board are up for election in the fall. Seats in districts B, E, F, & G. To get on the ballot, a candidate must get, I believe, 125 signatures from registered voters in that person's district. These must be filed by early June. You can get details from the voter registrar at 382-5741. The school board will be sponsoring an orientation session on Tuesday, May 11th , 4-6pm at the sb office. If you are interested in coming or for more info call 382-5104. The session will be led by Fred Morton, the Superintendent, and David McCrumb, vice chair of the sb, who is not up for reelection. This is a chance to find out what is involved in being on the sb.

It is important, now that we have elected sb's, that people run for these positions. And it is also valuable that there be more than one person running for each position. Please consider doing this or encouraging others to do so. Running for election is not as bad as it sounds. We need good people on the sb.

2) We will be presenting, explaining and defending our resolution concerning the secondary school situation in Blacksburg to the BoS (3rd floor, County Courthouse in Christiansburg) on Monday, May 10th, at 7:15pm. We unanimously adopted this resolution, but we also need the support of citizens to be sure that this is accepted and funded by the BoS. Please make an effort to attend this meeting and speak or at least show your support during the public address time at the start of that meeting (and following meetings until they act on it). (Of course, if you oppose it, you are welcome to speak at that time as well.)

3) We are deliberating about how to make cuts in our budget proposal so that it conforms to the appropriation we were given. This means cutting nearly $3 million from our requests. This is not easy. The superintendent convened a group of about 40 school people to make suggestions about where the money should go. He did this last year as well, and this has been a real learning experience for those who have been involved, seeing the difficult decisions we have to make. We will not make an official decision until our next meeting, so your input is still helpful. The administrartion has recommended putting most of the new money we have to work with into salary increases of 5.5% on the average (and .5% put aside to increase benefits to part-time people). I support this. We have made great strides on reducing class size. But the quality of education is also a function of the quality of the teacher in front of the class. And one direct way we can influence that is by offering good salaries.

4) We decided at our last meeting that we should have public addres at each of our regularly scheduled meetings (instead of just the first meeting of each month). Please feel free to take advantage of this opportunity to share your views about issues of concern to public education in Montgomery County at these times. Our next meeting will be Tuesday, May 18th at 7:30pm. This time it will be at Elliston-LaFayette Elementary School. We will also be touring the new HS site in Elliston before the meeting.

5) The SB also decided to cancel the last day of school, which, because of snow days, had been pushed to Monday, June 14th. We still meet the state requirements for amount of time that students should be in school each year.

James C. Klagge
Montgomery County School Board
Chair, and District F representative.

email: admin@gisone.com