School Officials and Supervisors Tangle Over Budget Priorities

Loudoun County school officials warned last week that they will have to freeze salaries and put students in mixed-age classes if they trim their spending request by as much as county supervisors have requested.

That message, delivered to the Board of Supervisors on Wednesday night during a budget work session, did not appear to change the board's view that the school system will have to make sacrifices when county resources are strained by plunging housing assessments. The supervisors decided to put off until this week a vote on the property tax rate for next year, which will determine how much revenue the schools receive.

The School Board has asked for an increase of $104 million, or 15 percent, in the schools operating budget for fiscal 2009. County Administrator Kirby M. Bowers proposed a county budget last month that would require school officials to cut $23 million from that request.

Several supervisors have said the School Board needs to go much further, cutting the request by $81.3 million. That still would mean increasing the tax rate from 96 cents to $1.10 and raising the average tax bill of homeowners by $131.

To demonstrate how difficult it would be to find those trims, School Board members said Wednesday that freezing employee salaries and increasing class size by one student in every grade would yield $37.3 million in savings -- less than half the supervisors' target.

"That's making your way toward $81.3 [million], but it's a long ways from $81.3," Superintendent Edgar B. Hatrick III said.

To achieve the remaining amount in cuts, "I would have to recommend to the board that we begin dismantling some of the programs that we have, not just trimming them back," Hatrick said.

He also said that one consequence of such an austere budget would be an increase in classes that combine students from different grades. Such "combination classes," found in smaller communities such as Aldie or Middleburg, would become a reality throughout the school system, he said.

Several supervisors expressed sympathy for school officials' plight but said there is no getting around the county's financial crunch and the pain that a significant tax increase would cause for residents already suffering in a bleak economy.

"I'm not sitting up here preparing to justify reductions in your . . . request [based] on the theory that you guys are bloated and you don't need it," Supervisor Stevens Miller (D-Dulles) said. "I'm going to justify it on the theory that times are tough, and we just don't have as much as we'd like to put into our very good schools."

That sentiment was echoed by Board of Supervisors Chairman Scott K. York (I).

"I've supported the schools year after year," he said. "I'm just very concerned this year about several folks who are literally hurting."