School board candidates outline priorities

The dismal state of the school budget is dominating the race for the Mason District seat on the Fairfax County school board. At a forum sponsored by the Broyhill Crest Community Association in Annandale Tuesday evening, candidates Samantha Rucker and Sandy Evans agreed that funding cuts should target the central administrative staff, not the classroom. The special election is March 2.

Rucker works in the office of the state’s attorney general, where her specialty is education law, she told the audience. She formerly worked as an instructional assistant and was a substitute teacher at schools in Annandale. She served on FCPS advisory committees on minority student achievement and the science curriculum and was a member of the board for the Higher Horizon Head Start program in Bailey’s Crossroads.

Evans, a journalist at the Washington Post for two decades, was a long-time school volunteer, starting as a room parent at Sleepy Hollow Elementary School. She was a member of several superintendent advisory committees and co-founded parent advocacy groups to urge a later start time for high schools and to make FCPS grading policies more in line with those of other school systems. Evans told the audience she will work on school board issues full time if elected.

Rucker said she is running is because the school board is “not responsive, not transparent, and not accountable to the community as a whole.” She questioned whether the school district’s $2.3 billion budget is insufficient. “We are being told it’s not enough. I don’t buy it,” she said. “It’s not being spent where it needs to be spent.”

“Our schools need a fair assessment of how the money is spent,” she said. “Then we can determine if $2.3 billion is too much or not enough.”

According to Rucker, “Money needs to be spent in the classroom,” on things like textbooks and teachers, “not the bureaucracy.” She called Superintendent Jack Dale’s proposal to eliminate elementary band and strings “outrageous.” Noting that Dale proposed cutting staff by 5 percent, Rucker suggested 10 percent.

Rucker vowed to bring fiscal responsibility to the school board. She says the Mason District needs a representative on the board who understands the needs of the schools in this area, which have large proportions of students who are English language learners or eligible for free lunches.

Evans noted that Dale originally wanted to cut the needs-based funding formula, which would have been devastating to Mason District schools. Had that proposal stayed in the budget, Bailey’s Elementary would have lost 14 teachers.

“We must keep money in the classroom,” Evans said. As a founding member of the Fairfax Education Coalition—which includes the two teacher unions and parent advocacy group—Evans has been reviewing the budget to look for areas where cuts can be made without harming the classroom. She would like to see cuts in the central administrative staff rather than teachers who are “on the front line.”

Evans opposes budget proposals to raise class sizes and eliminate elementary band and strings, full-day kindergarten, and indoor track and field. She also supports higher pay for teachers. “We do have an excellent school system,” Evans says. “That’s not to say we can’t make it better.”

“I firmly believe in accountability and transparency,” Evans told the audience, noting that as a parent advocate, she had to put in Freedom of Information requests to get school budget data that should have been readily available to the public. In one instance, she was told it would cost $10,000 to get the information.

She called for better ways for parents and community residents to communicate to the school board and said school board work sessions, which take place during the work day, should be recorded, so the public can know what is going on. The school board usually does more during those sessions than at regular school board meetings, which are held in the evening.

Both candidates mentioned that FCPS will receive an additional $61 million now that the Gov. Bob McDonnell agreed to “unfreeze” a change in the “local composite index,” the formula used to distribute state funding to local school systems. If the General Assembly approves the change to the LCI, FCPS might be able to retain some programs that were on the chopping block.

Members of the audience brought up several issues, including the need to involve the community earlier in school boundary changes. Several people complained about the failure to address parents’ concerns when students were transferred from Annandale High School to Falls Church High School last year.