Nowhere to go now but up


Let us stipulate up front that of all Halifax County’s governing boards — the Board of Supervisors, Industrial Development Authority, School Board — it’s the latter that has the toughest job, and for the most part our school trustees do their jobs better than the rest.

It’s been an agonizing year for everyone involved with the public school division, from the Central Office administration on down to school principals to classroom teachers to bus drivers and custodial staff and all the rest.

Let us also stipulate that as with all things in life, today’s Goofus is likely to be tomorrow’s Gallant, and no one has a monopoly on wisdom and foresight, your humble scribe most emphatically included.

All that out of the way, this is probably a good time for one last round of throat-clearing, yoga exercises and a trip to the medicine cabinet for the ol’ blood pressure medicine.

Okay, time to let it rip: What in High Hades got into the trustees on Monday night?

Perhaps the best way to explain the June 2021 monthly meeting of the Halifax County School Board is to imagine the General Assembly enacted a special dispensation for our trustees to partake of the wacky weed a month before marijuana legalization goes into effect in Virginia, because the debates had a decided “I’ll have what they’re smoking” feel to them. The proximate cause of the epic foolishness on display Monday night was two-fold: One, an administration request to purchase property next to the high school to facilitate the HCHS modernization project (construction of a new school or the top-to-bottom renovation of the existing one), and a concurrent crisis — and I don’t think that’s too strong a word — with the ongoing depletion of the school workforce, especially teachers. From those two subjects a jaw-dropping 150 minutes, give or take, ensued. In moviegoing terms, it was as if Hollywood’s biggest box-office bombs — Waterworld, Howard the Duck, Gigli, Battleship Earth — had been compressed into a single sitting. With stale popcorn served.

It’s a challenge two days later to even describe the full badness of this meeting. Was the low point plumbed when ED-6 trustee Todd Moser compared an employer vaccination requirement to the tyranny of Hitler and Communism? Did we hit rock bottom when ED-2’s Sandra Garner Coleman corrected Moser on his grammar? That one seemed a little uncalled for, and I say this as someone who takes pride in mine own impeckable grammer and spelling. What about the stirring call by ED-4 trustee Jay Camp for everyone to pack into a bus, travel to Richmond and demand that the General Assembly raise Halifax County’s sales tax by another penny so our teachers can earn decent salaries? If I remember the events of 2019 correctly, it takes more than mere legislative approval of a local option sales tax for this font of revenue to actually materialize — Halifax County voters also have to sign off on the deal, and the point was made that county taxpayers should not have to bear further tax increases (I guess property taxes are real and sales taxes are not.) Is Camp or anyone else serious about sticking Halifax with a sales tax rate that’s not one cent but two cents higher than everyone else’s?

Each of these dance moves on the floor of banana peels would be a strong contender for the low point of Monday’s meeting. Alas, School Board Chair Kathy Fraley broke free of the pack near the end of the proceedings with a comment that now ranks as the second most disastrous thing said at a Halifax County public meeting in the past year. (The top spot continues to be held by our county “militia commander” when she offered that her fellow guntoters were fully trained to “shoot the right ones.” It’s going to take a real humdinger to top that one.) Fraley’s comment was nowhere as malicious — it wasn’t really malicious at all, it was just a gaffe for the ages — and my guess is she’d like to run the reel backwards on this one: “Teachers don’t work for money, they work for the future of Halifax County.” Ooof.

Let’s cut our board chairwoman some slack here: what I suspect Fraley was trying to say is that no teacher goes into the profession for money, and she would certainly be right about that. (If she really believes teachers are unbothered by matters financial, we have a bigger problem than I thought). It’s also important to recognize that Fraley’s comment reflects a longtime bias that teaching attracts a captive workforce, consisting of women who have few employment opportunities outside of the classroom. This was true for my grandmother, a longtime school counselor in the Halifax public school system. It was true for my late mother when she was only allowed to enroll at the University of Virginia through its teaching program. It’s not true for the current generation of women and it sure as heck won’t be true for my daughter, who might just have a notion to get out of college and find a job that pays decently. I suspect Fraley is guilty of little more than antiquated thinking, but that’s pretty unfortunate on its own terms.

Look: our School Board may be over its head in collectively trying to figure out what to do about the high school and how to keep teachers on the job in Halifax County when said teachers can earn salaries that are four- and five-figures higher in neighboring school divisions, but they didn’t arrive at this point alone — far from it. One thing that came up during Monday’s 2-1/2 hour talkathon was a simple truth: our school facilities are poorly maintained because the School Board is in a constant battle to keep up with other divisions in offering competitive employee compensation, and the easiest money to slip into the instructional budget is the funding that should be going into the maintenance and custodial budget. And even with this Peter-robs-Paul act that’s been going for decades, our teacher salaries continue to lag behind.

Just to bring up two comps: Mecklenburg County may have a lower real estate tax rate than Halifax ($0.42 vs. our $0.50 rate), but Mecklenburg also has a Microsoft data center whose real value matches and possibly exceeds the rest of the county combined. Meanwhile, Pittsylvania County’s real estate tax rate is 12 cents — that is, 24 percent — higher than our own. You do the math.

Should the School Board have gone forward with the specific item on the agenda — Superintendent Mark Lineburg’s request to purchase the 12-acre “Powell property” next to the high school to serve either as land for a new high school, or a construction staging area for an extensive HCHS redo? Yes it should have. That flub is on the four members who voted no: Moser, Camp, Fraley and ED-7 trustee Keith McDowell. As Freddie Edmunds aptly pointed out during the meeting, their recalcitrance means the high school modernization project is stuck — lacking adequate land, lacking a plan, with money wasted with each passing month.

Moser planted his flag on the hill of an argument that the School Board must decide how to upgrade elementary schools before he’ll vote to pour a hundred-million plus into the high school, and on the face of it, it’s a reasonable point. Who doesn’t want the best for our children regardless of where they reside in the county? But let’s be clear: Lineburg and the administration have presented very preliminary plans for possibly consolidating the five oldest and smallest elementaries (Clays Mill, Meadville, Scottsburg, Sinai and Sydnor Jennings) into three and possibly two new schools, each around 400-500 students each, and at the rate the School Board is moving, that’ll happen sometime in the 23rd century. (Say hello to Captain Picard for me.) Meantime, children at Meadville and Clays Mill and Sydnor Jennings and the rest have no chance of seeing their current schools upgraded while they are still students there, but presumably they could enjoy the benefits of a new high school — also their school — if the School Board will only get off the shneid and act. Like, now.

Darkness precedes the dawn, sometimes there’s really nowhere else to go but up, and hope springs eternal, which are all things members of the School Board need to repeat after me after Monday’s meeting. C’mon, folks. Pull it together. And rope in the Board of Supervisors while you’re at it, since for all the ranting above this is the governing body that bears chief responsibility for the beleaguered state of Halifax County Public Schools. Fair to demand or not, the people of Halifax County need you to do the right thing, even if the usual anti-tax, anti-schools contingent hollers at you for doing it. Pull it together.

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