School Board Members Weigh Priorities In First Budget Work Session

Fairfax County School Board members weighed “three very different policy options” at its first budget work session Monday night. They supported the principles in Superintendent Jack Dale’s proposed adjustments but struggled with deciding which option had the greatest impact.

In April, the county's Board of Supervisors approved , an amount that board members say does not account for changing enrollment or increasing per-pupil costs.

As a result, Dale and the school board are to a 2 percent pay raise and step increase for employees.

The adjusted budget Dale presented Monday includes: 

• a 1 percent pay raise and step increase for teachers
• a one-year implementation of a full-day kindergarten program
• $500,000 for disciplinary reform
• an extra $10.4 million — for a total of $28.4 million — to accommodate rising enrollment

The projected number of new students for September 2011 has not changed. However, growth will be concentrated in the county’s elementary schools, which are more expensive to expand because class sizes tend to be smaller than in middle or high schools, Dale said.

The board will either have to use $3.5 million of the $5 million in funding it set aside last quarter for fiscal year 2013; implement full-day kindergarten over the course of two years; or change teachers' salary adjustment to a bonus to make up for the shortfall that remains.

Most board members said they supported full-day kindergarten sooner rather than later, but some questioned if a one-year plan was the best option in the face of other commitments.

“We have to do something meaningful in rolling out full-day kindergarten. I think there’s unanimity on the board on that," Board member Tina Hone said. The division lies in how full-day kindergarten expands to the 36 elementary schools without it, she said.

"I’m troubled by our ability to find the money in our budget for some programs and not others. Had some of us known that there was a real possibility to find $7 or $8 million to fund full-day kindergarten in one year, some of us would have advocated for other programs. I think the board was shortchanged in that discussion,” she said.

Hone’s argument opened a discussion about the system’s philosophical shift in academic standards and expectations — for both teachers and students.

When summer school enrollment peaked three years ago, teachers were expected to start intervening with struggling students during the school year. Traditional county-wide summer school was replaced with an individualized approach, in which schools chose programs -- from three -week jump start programs to chess clubs  -- to implement during summer months based on their students individual needs. Those programs are funded by money each school sets aside at the beginning of the year, or, through grants, non-profits and PTA donations, Dale said.

The unintended consequence of that decision was pushing the bulk of the work from the summer to the school year, adding to the work that already had to be done in the classrooms. This put increased pressure and time demands on teachers, Hone said.

“If you’re in one of the more challenged schools in a cluster and you’re working 12 hours a day just to get your kids over the hump, and your colleague in another school doesn’t have to deal with that … I can’t even imagine what that morale issue might be like,” she said.

JoAnn Karsh, executive director of the Fairfax Education Association, said teachers are required to spend at least 90 minutes each week doing those types of interventions, an after-school requirement beyond the scope of their contracts. Teachers surveyed said by the FEA and Fairfax County Federation of Teachers say they work on average 29 hours more per week than their contracted hours.

“We’re trying to find balance,” FEA President Michael Hairston said. “I hope addressing workload can make up for that extra one percent [that would have gone toward salary increases].”

The board meets for another work session May 16 before holding public hearings May 16 and 17. After a final work session on May 19, board members will formally adopt a 2012 budget May 26.