As Prince William County begins its budget deliberations, I want to encourage the supervisors to remember the poor, beleaguered schools, their students and their teachers. As it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a county to do the right thing by its schools. The BOCS must set the current tax rate.
Regardless of political correctness or other artificial constraints some folks will attempt to put on the situation, the BOCS needs to do 2 things. They need to set the tax rate high enough to start bringing the schools up to snuff after the long , lean period following the housing crash that began in 2007. They they need to give the School Board a little larger slice of the pie.
The school system needs to do three things:
1. Start reducing class size.
2. Give teachers and other employees a raise.
3. Make basic supplies more readily available.
Frankly, no one wants to hear the old tea party rallying call to ‘Stop Spending.’ Those words are simplistic answers for simplistic people. The average person has no idea what programs are mandated and what programs are not. I have spent more years in the system than most folks and I don’t know all the ins and outs in that regard. No one does when dealing with a hugely complex system like Prince William, Loudoun, Fairfax or Stafford.
