On a day when major companies announced tens of thousands of continuing layoffs on top of millions of job losses these past few months, the King George School Board is still talking about pay raises.
What planet do these people live on and where do they expect the money to come from?  
Simple, let’s just ask Santa, also known as the Board of Supervisors, despite the directive from the supervisors to have a “no increase budget” for the upcoming budget year.  And this, despite the fact that the state has already reduced its funding for schools and reduced the amount that localities are required to pay in school funding.
On the county side, employees are not getting pay raises.
King George is already facing a projected year-end shortfall of over $1,000,000, according to Donita Harper, Director of Finance. No problem for some of the school board members apparently ... just take it out of savings. The county has a fund balance; School Board member Payne Kilbourn thinks that money should be used for teacher pay raises. Or maybe the county should raise taxes – his favorite theme.
Hello … ? Apparently the school board has not noticed that there is a recession going on and that it seems to only be getting worse. Companies are trying to conserve cash just to stay alive.  Right now for most employees, pay raises are taking second place to just being happy to have a job in the first place.
And by the way, even in good times it is bad fiscal policy to use your savings account – which is what the fund balance is – to pay for pay raises or anything similar that becomes self-perpetuating, imbedded in every future budget.
School Board Chairman Sherrie Allwine pointed out to her colleagues that it might be better to forgo pay raises and instead try to keep from reducing their workforce. We have been critical of Ms. Allwine in the past, but now she sounds like the voice of reason – for once.
Pay raises are not the only area where the King George School Board is bucking the current economic trends. Big corporations are cutting out their matching contributions to their employees’ 401(k) plans, but the King George schools continue to pay full benefits, including retirement, for its part-time employees. And when we say part-time we’re not talking 30 or 35 hours a week. No – part-time in this case is 20 hours a week.
Now we don’t want school bus drivers to fill our tiny parking lot at The Journal with big yellow buses in protest. And we appreciated the nice ladies who drove our kids to school each morning. But perhaps it is time to consider changing that policy for future employees.
Paying benefits for all your employees is  wonderful when times are good. But right now times are not good (do the school board members pay attention?); people and businesses are struggling.  
Besides the fact that it is not the School Board’s job to decide on tax increases or how to spend the county’s general fund, it is totally unrealistic. The Board of Supervisors is not going to give the School Board more money.
Even though the county’s finances are the supervisors’ headache, it would help the School Board’s credibility if members )showed that they are paying some attention to fiscal reality.  
They would rather ask for a big budget increase and then complain when they don’t get everything they ask for. It’s a time honored yet transparent tactic crassly designed to try and make the Supervisors look like a bunch of heartless tightwads.  Funny thing is that the public always seems to see through this tactic, yet the school board never learns the lesson.
It would also help if they noticed that when they give those across the board pay increases, the biggest beneficiaries of those raises are not the classroom teachers, but the school administrators. But that is an editorial for another day.