ay UArHNE HUTCHINSON

ay UArHNE HUTCHINSON

Rwahcnnock Newt Staff Writer

Judging from the signals given by Rappahannock’s Board of Supervisors in its first round of budget work, the School Board and every other department of local government can expect their revenue requests for 1987-88 to be trimmed by the supervisors.

“If you had to cut this budget, where would you cut?” Supervisor Charles Estes asked the School Board members gathered around the courtroom table during a joint work session April 13.

“At the bottom line,” answered Nancy Reeve, with no hesitation.

“Can’t do the bottom line,” Mr. Estes replied, referring to the board’s practice over the past several years of trimming school spending by categories to exercise greater control over how reductions are absorbed.

“It’s a nasty jump,” the Piedmont District supervisor said, of the proposed $$3,621,026 school budget, which calls for an increase of $340,248 in local funding. “I know you adopted this budget in good faith. We’re not questioning your good faith, but where would you suggest we cut? Give us something to think about between now and April 22 (when the public hearing on the school budget is scheduled).”

“I’d like to see it cut - if it’s cut — on the bottom line, and let us go back through the budget again,” repeated Chairman Beverly Massie. She recalled that the School Board met every Tuesday in March to work on the proposed 1987-88 budget, painstakingly reviewing each line item and trimming expenditures where possible.

Making adjustments to any reductions would take that long again, she said, but if cuts are made to the bottom line, “it just doesn’t tie our hands quite as tight.”

One local firm that employs a significant number of Piedmont District residents cut employee salaries by three percent recently, Mr. Estes noted. Those workers and others whose pay increases have amounted to just seven percent in the last two years combined have called to register their concern over a spiraling local tax rate, he said. “They look at this 10 percent (pay increase for teachers) every year - I have a hard time with it. My people have a hard time with it.”

At the same time, Mr. Estes conceded, the gap between the pay for Rappahannock teachers and the salary of teachers elsewhere in the state is widening. “And I know that if they don’t get that 10 percent, we’ll really be in big trouble . .. It’s an unpopular situation. It’s an unpopular year.”

School Superintendent Robert Estabrook called it “disheartening” for the supervisors to accord Rappahannock teachers 34 percent pay raises over the last three years - “I doubt if more than three or four school divisions in the state have done any better” - when, over that same three-year period, “rank-wise, we have slipped.”

(Last year, Rappahannock ranked 127th among Virginia’s 136