City Schools and the Economic Crisis

In these difficult economic times citizens, businesses, and governments are faced with very difficult decisions. This does not exclude the Roanoke City School System. In today’s edition of the Roanoke Times there was a story that the Roanoke City Schools are looking at a $15 million dollar budget reduction. This could not come at a worse time. Roanoke City currently has a graduation rate barely over 50% and the School Board has really started to get some traction in addressing this situation. These reductions will cripple the ability of the board to do the things necessary to not only bring the graduation rate up but to effectively educate the students. The discussion now is around closing schools, laying off teachers, and increasing class size. This cannot be allowed to happen. The #1 issue facing the citizens, School Board, and City Council is the current graduation rates and the state of our schools. This does more to keep people and business out of Roanoke City than any capital expense will do to bring people into our city. To be very clear if our schools get worse Roanoke will see its citizens move to Roanoke County, Salem, or Botertourt. In addition to this it will be very difficult to improve the economic development in the city. To address the issue it is going to take everyone coming together. Here are my thoughts on how to address this:

1- Citizens of Roanoke-
a. Understand that these are difficult times and hard decisions have to be made.
b. Support and Trust the School Board and City Council but verify their actions.
2- School Board
a. Continue to make good decisions and push the schools to move forward.
b. Be willing to absorb a reduction of five million dollars.
3- City Council-
a. Understand that Schools are the #1 issue and make decisions accordingly.
b. Ask local employers to make up 3 million of these deficits.
c. Evaluate your budget and cut all non-essential spending and redirect these funds to the schools. If there is money set aside for things like an Amphitheater or Trolleys that run around the city vacant then move this money to the schools. If there are programs that are not working suspend them and move the money to the schools. It would be great if seven million could be found in this process.
d. Understand it is easy to look to raise taxes first but in these times the last thing people need is to pay the government more money. Only after all spending cuts have been made would I advise looking at tax increases. Many economists say that tax cuts actually stimulate more revenue so you can quickly deduce what raising them in this economy will do.

These are my thoughts and I would love to get your thoughts on this issue. Let’s work together to solve this issue.