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Sadness, rather than anger, was the dominant mood at Tuesday’s meeting of the Rappahannock School Board.
—Sadness that the controversy over the budgetary process has separated the teachers and the Board into two camps.
—Sadness that the lines of communication between the two groups have broken down.
—Sadness that the budget fight has divided the community as a whole. It’s disturbing to see the school system’s linen laundered in public, but the teachers have a legitimate grievance. As part of the inducement to take a part in the Rappahannock educational system, teachers are given a pay scale that rewards experience and loyalty. This scale, with regular step increments or raises in salary, is theirs by right when they sign their contracts.
This year, the School Board approved a $500 increase in each step of the teachers’ salary scale as a cost of living raise. This increase, added to the existing salary scale, amounted to a jump of 6.8 per cent, figured on the basis of the average salary for 55 teachers in the school system. But a 2.5 per cent increase already belonged to the teachers. Only the $500 increase could properly be called a cost of living raise and it amounts to 4.3 per cent— not 6.8 per cent.
To call the total 6.8 per cent increase a cost of living raise is playing games with words and numbers.
If the county can only afford to give its teachers a 4.3 per cent cost of living raise, then this same 4.3 per cent should have been applied to the salaries of the rest of the system’s employees also—to administrators, to aides, to bus drivers and to custodial help.
Or, if the Board wanted to give
77.7%