School Board Approves POS Updates, Moves Into Budget Mode

The Warren County School Board on Wednesday, March 6, unanimously voted 4-0 to approve several updates to the school division’s 2024-2025 Program of Studies (POS), among other actions, and started its annual work to produce a budget for fiscal year 2025. 

WCPS Superintendent Chris Ballenger on March 6 offered the district’s draft fiscal year 2025 budget.

School Board Chair Kristen Pence, Vice Chair Antoinette Funk, and board members Andrea Lo and Melanie Salins were present, while Thomas McFadden, Jr., was absent for the Wednesday regular meeting, which lasted four hours — five hours if the closed session held directly before the public meeting is included.

Regarding the POS updates, Warren County Public Schools (WCPS) Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Heather Bragg said that the biggest change is likely the new prerequisites for the honors, AP, and dual enrolled (DE) courses. 

With the School Board’s approval, prerequisites for the next school year in honors/AP/DE courses will  include passing the SOL (state exam) for the previous course.

“So, for example, if you’re going to take Honors Geometry, the prerequisite is that you’ve passed the Algebra I SOL, which is the required, verified credit for graduation,” said Bragg (above at podium). “Same thing in the case of a dual enrolled in U.S. and Virginia History, where passing a World History SOL would be the requirement in order to be eligible to enroll in that dual enrolled class in the 11th grade.”

Other POS updates for the 2024-2025 school year include new middle school course offerings, such as Introduction to Computers for 6th graders at Warren County Middle School, which replaces the Career Investigations elective for 6th grade, and Theater courses will be added at Skyline Middle School.

At the high school level, Education for Employment I and II will be offered next year at Skyline High School, which will drop its Sports Management course, Bragg said.

Other board actions included authorization for the disposal of the auditorium seats at E. Wilson Morrison (EWM) Elementary School through an auction.

Pending the approval of funding from the Warren County Board of Supervisors, the EWM auditorium will be converted into a multi-purpose/gymnatorium. Work is scheduled to start in early April. The current construction plan is to remove the auditorium seats. 

“We would like to offer the community and or other groups the opportunity to purchase rows of seats,” said WCPS Assistant Superintendent of Administration George “Buck” Smith. “It is staff’s recommendation to surplus the historical seats by auction. WCPS would reach out to local auctioneers for this project.”

In addition, Smith said that staff also wants to donate several of the 658 seats to EWM for a historical display and a row of seats to the Warren Heritage Society. Funds from the auction would go toward assisting in the fundraising efforts to purchase stackable chairs for the gymnatorium when used as an auditorium, he added.   

The board also unanimously approved four invoices totaling $34,632.24 to Education Logistics Inc. — which is the sole source provider for WCPS routing software, GPS monitoring, and the parent portal that includes the app for parents to receive school bus arrival alerts — as well as the purchase of Meraki licenses from ePlus Technology Inc. in the amount of $44,369.77. The licenses are for all WCPS access points that transmit the wifi to all WCPS buildings.   

Draft budget unveiled 

WCPS Superintendent Chris Ballenger, WCPS Finance Director Robert Ballentine, and Smith presented the draft WCPS fiscal year 2025 operating fund budget to the School Board.  

With talks beginning about the budget, members of the Warren County Education Association (WCEA) listed budget priority items for the board members to consider during the community participation portion of the meeting.

Elisa Bradford, a Warren County resident, teacher for 17 years, and WCEA President of Secondary Education, said the budget should include teacher salary increases.

“Currently, out of the eight surrounding counties, Warren County is in sixth place for salary,” Bradford said.

For instance, Clark County, Va., seeks a 5 percent salary increase for teachers in its budget, she said, noting that Frederick County, Va., is looking for a 6.6 percent increase, and Shenandoah County, Va., is looking for a 3.5 percent increase while Warren County is considering different options, one being just a step and the other a 3 percent increase, “which will only keep us at the same ranking and not fall us any lower.”

“The question that is always asked is how do we retain teachers when looking at proposed increases?” said Bradford. “Teacher retention is going to be difficult in Warren County if it doesn’t keep up the competitive salaries.”

Rebecca Hudson Hodge, WCEA president for elementary education, said it’s imperative for the future of WCPS to adequately pay the teachers and staff in order to stay competitive with surrounding counties.

“The minimum compensation for WCPS employees should be the step plus 3 percent that has been proposed,” she said. “I also encourage you to look at the salary scale for career teachers, for teachers who stay through retirement age.”

The disparity in salaries grows for teachers with 30 years of experience and advanced degrees with WCPS ranking fifth out of eight, said Hudson Hodge. 

“That means that four of the surrounding counties pay between $4,000 and $11,000 more than WCPS each year,” she said. “I encourage you to look at making Warren County Public Schools a place where teachers can build a lifelong career by offering competitive salaries throughout the salary scale.”

What’s a board to do?

Another noteworthy section of the School Board’s meeting was during the board members’ individual reports when they each discussed the board’s specific duties. 

Lo, for instance, said the School Board’s duties are to develop policy, to approve a school budget, to hire and evaluate the superintendent, to approve or reject hiring recommendations of the superintendent, to hear appeals on student and staff issues under specific circumstances, and to follow all laws, rules, and regulations.

What the board should not be doing, said Lo, is to be taking actions that are not in keeping with open meeting laws and the spirit of public transparency and democracy. Nor should the board be micromanaging WCPS administrators and staff. 

“Our work should generally be conducted in an open and public forum like this,” Lo said Wednesday night. “This provides transparency and allows the public to observe and participate in the decision making process. Over the past few months, we have had more and more conversations and discussions as a board over email, which is not transparent or easily accessible to the public.

“The topics,” she added, “often have been on individual situations, not conversations about policy or budget. This makes me really uncomfortable when I have tried to express that to the board.”

Board member Lo (left at dais) on Wednesday received a standing ovation from several residents regarding her comments about the role of the School Board.

Lo also said she has some concerns about how members have been behaving as a board lately.

“We are elected public officials, which means we do the public’s work with some specific exceptions,” she said. “Our discussions should be public, as should our decisions and our votes. Our power lies in our actions as a full board, not as individual board members.”

Additionally, Lo said it’s inappropriate for the School Board to be weighing in on individual student discipline issues — with the exception of cases that have come to the board on appeal from the child’s parent or guardian — or directing or reprimanding individual staff other than the superintendent.

“In recent months, this board has received and sent dozens of emails among ourselves and had closed session conversations about issues that I believe the board should not be deciding on,” Lo said. “These include student and staff issues.” 

Without stating any of the specific issues, but rather in broad terms, Lo added that this has included appropriate punishment for a student, appropriate placement for a child with special needs, and safety and threat assessments.

“It is inappropriate for us to get involved in the individual student and staff issues,” she said. “These should be handled by the trained professionals who we have hired and pay to work in this school district, not by us as elected officials, as board members. We are not trained in special education threat assessment employment law.

“As a board, our role is to make policy,” said Lo. “When we try to weigh in on individual cases, this constitutes government overreach. I’m really concerned that we are making our administrators and staff miserable.”

In fact, since the School Board’s work session in late February, Pence said she has had seven administrators independently come to her and express concerns about the actions of the board.

“The way that our board can overstep, they feel levels of stress I think that they’ve not ever felt before,” Pence said. “They feel hindered by us and sometimes I think afraid to even make decisions because they don’t know how we are going to respond and how we are going to react.

“These are administrators that have been in our county for decades and would plan to retire here,” Pence added. “And, you know, we have had so many discussions happening about how to retain teachers, how to retain administrators, and this isn’t the way.”

In the end, she said, it’s not going to be about the money and how much they can make; it’s going to be about what kind of support they get. 

“As a life-long resident of Warren County and someone who plans to stay here, I do find it heartbreaking that our teachers and our administrators who want to be in this county and who year after year have chosen us and chosen to be here, are not feeling that anymore,” said Pence. “I hope that we can come together and really just show that kind of support that they need.”

To watch the meeting in its entirety, go to: https://wcps.new.swagit.com/videos/299255