education programs to the basic aid category. (Currently, Rappahannock

education programs to the basic aid category. (Currently, Rappahannock pays SO per cent of the costs of special programs with the other half coming from the state. Moving the programs to the basic education category would make Rappahannock responsible for 60 per cent of the costs.)

“Awareness (of problems with state funding procedures for education) is increasing...but democracies are slow creatures,” stated the Senator.

A member of the audience questioned the state policy of establishing minimum funding levels per student that applied to all localities. He added that he didn’t think a $1500 per pupil expenditure in an urban county necessarily guaranteed a better education than a lower per pupil expenditure in a rural county.

“It’s true that dollars don’t make good education,” Senator Miller agreed.

The speaker continued that the saturation of money into a school system reaches the point where it no longer serves a purpose and instead, creates waste. As an example, he noted that a school system could decide to paint a building twice a year rather than once in order to use all of it’s allocation and not have the funding level for the following year cut because money was left over.

Miller acknowledged that this kind of policy created problems throughout all facets of government, not just the schools. "Programs need to be designed so that money left over is an asset and won’t have a negative impact on next year’s budget ...Programs are not designed to foster wise use of funds. They are not designed to encourage savings,” the Senator concluded.

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A suburbanite put on a last-minute spurt of speed to catch his train—but missed it. A bystander remarked, “If you had just run a little faster you would have made it.”

“No,” the suburbanite replied, “it wasn’t a case of running faster, but of starting sooner.”