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rounding counties...”. Should anyone be surprised or distressed to learn that our minimum salary is under the average salary in surrounding counties?
One final thought: those prematurely worrying about the salaries of school teachers in the coming county budget should save themselves the trouble. We have the same School Board this year as we did last year and last year this Board gave the teachers a 12 percent increase, I believe, when even Governor Robb only asked them to grant 10 percent and the Board did this in defiance of the Board of Supervisors. Governor Robb requested it, he said, to bring teachers’ salaries which median had been determined by allowing teachers’ unions in the state to our north and west to strike and force hundreds of thousands of school children into the streets at the start of each school year until the unions got what they demanded. And what they got through these tactics helped build the national median which concerned Robb so much.
And now Governor Robb has proposed to the Assembly a blackmailing tactic of his own: that the Assembly mandate another 10 percent increase in each of the next two years and punish any School District for failure to approve it by taking away $146 in State Aid per school child! It is by no means certain that the General Assembly will approve this blackmail/extortion any more than they did for Robb when he suggested it befoi-e. Nor should they, for the Assemblymen are also aware that 99 our of 139 School Districts in Virginia in 1984-85 declined to grant the 10 percent increase Robb demanded.
Peter the Great said, “I’ll make you do what I want even if I have to drag you along, kicking and screaming.” But the Governor of Virginia is not Peter the Great and the motto of this commonwealth makes the difference between them.
ROBERT W. EASTHAM Flint Hill.
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