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Numbers games
We were surprised to hear a representative of Virginia’s Department of Education tell our county School Board that, based on a new pilot program, additional educational funding may be available from Richmond.
Has anyone from the Department of Education spoken with Governor L. Douglas Wilder lately?
The last we read, in widely circulated news accounts, Gov. Wilder warned the state’s localities to brace for additional cutbacks in the level of school funding from Richmond.
We suspect that School Board Chairwoman Beverly Massie was correct when she told Dr. Emmet Ridley that, in her experience, the additional money will come from the same old shell game — money taken from one program to fund some other new initiative which has caught the fancy of the bureaucrats in Richmond.
Meanwhile, the paperwork piles up. The new program espoused by Dr. Ridley last week will entail yet more reports to Richmond, involving “indicators” which will supposedly measure Rappahannock’s success in educating its children, and the progress made from year to year.
Dr. Ridley assured the School Board that it will actually decrease the paperwork burden by replacing some of the reports now required during the Administrative Review — but we remain, like Mrs. Massie, a “doubting Thomas.”
Another pertinent point was raised by Dr. John Tole, who remarked that he understood that the state planned to reward school districts which showed outstanding progress, not those which remained deficient
We suggest that the state Department of Education might better spend its “scarce resources,” in Dr. Ridley’s words, by providing money which will be spent in actually educating children rather than spending it in generating yet more reports which will principally be used as dust receptors in school offices, newsrooms and libraries.
We hope that the School Board’s message to Dr. Ridley will be heard loud and clear in Richmond: Send us money to teach our children, not to push yet more paper into the bloated bowels of the state’s education bureauracracy.
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