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that Virginia functions concerning minorities,” Del. Smith said.
Many of Gov. Holton’s accomplishments while in office concerned addressing problems in education. Gov. Holton said one of the high points of his term was the improvement of racial relations.
In September 1970, his first year in office, the busing decree went into effect.
He said one of the ways he and his wife supported desegregation was by sending their children to predominantly black schools.
“We let our children go to the school which they would have been assigned. They actually lived on state property when we were in the executive mansion and they weren’t required to go to the bused schools. We thought the better part of leadership was to let them go where they would have gone if they had been private citizens,” Gov. Holton said.
“I think the example that was set by the first family made it easier for Virginians to adjust to a very new school situation,” Gov. Holton said. He said the state adjusted more readily than other southern states such as Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, where the desegregation of the schools erupted into violence.
Gov. Holton, whose administration had attempted to correct disparities in education, said the problems still remain.
“We rewrote the school formula to acknowledge that some counties weren’t going to be able to afford enough funds to provide an adequate education for their children. We rewrote the formula to give them more money from state sources, we could do it because we had general revenue sharing funds coming from the federal government. We took advantage of those funds to help eliminate those disparities, but they keep coming back and they are facing us today. The state is now facing a lawsuit on constitutional issues that the state is going to have to face up to. We’re going to have to put some state money into eliminating those disparities,” he said.
Gov. Holton said another accomplishment was cleaning up the state’s rivers. The state raised taxes in order to provide matching funds, which were used along with funds from a federal program that allowed localities to build wastewater treatment facilities at a reduced cost. He said the localities were paying 65 cents per dollar to build treatment plants until the state participated in
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