"Albemarle County residents urged the School Board on Wednesday to set a “living wage” for employees greater than the $9.75 an hour included in Superintendent Pamela Moran’s proposed budget. Others asked the board to add math and literacy specialists and fund new initiatives for international studies programs.

More than 100 county administrators, teachers, parents and taxpayers filled Lane Auditorium at the County Office Building to hear 19 residents voice their priorities during a public hearing on the proposed $149 million budget for fiscal 2008.

Crozet resident Virginia Rovnyak noted that the 30 percent increase in the county’s assessed property values in the past two years has an impact on school employees.

“This is a very expensive place to live, yet we expect devoted people working in our schools to live on what they get and it’s not right,” Rovnyak said.

Albemarle County Education Association President Steve Gissendanner said school employees other than teachers affect children.

“[The education association] strongly supports the ‘living wage’ initiative because it will help attract and retain capable employees and because it is the right thing to do,” said Gissendanner, who also teaches fifth grade at Woodbrook Elementary.

Board member Stephen Koleszar said the contributions of school employees should be recognized, but he said the fact that the employees who would be affected are part-time or do not work a full calendar year complicates the issue.

“It’s hard sometimes to talk about ‘living wage’ in the context of schools because most of our employees who are in that category are nine-month employees,” Koleszar said. “Cafeteria workers might work four hours a day. Bus drivers might work six.”

Jon Stokes, a board member who sat on a joint committee with members of the county Board of Supervisors that researched the “living wage” issue, said $9.75 an hour is a placeholder in the school division’s current proposal. The lowest salary for a county employee would most likely be higher, he said.

The final figure the joint committee will recommend is $11.07 an hour.

Stokes said that if such a figure were adopted, there would be less funding for division initiatives, such as adding specialists and keeping teacher salaries within the top quartile of the division’s market, a board goal.

“If the Board of Supervisors is serious about adopting a ‘living wage,’ it would be our hope that they would fully fund it and allow for new initiatives for the schools,” Stokes said.

Stokes and board member Diantha McKeel said the board may have to balance the effects of the wage with the amount of new initiatives it can fund.

The school’s current proposal devotes $707,685 to a $9.75 an hour “living wage” that would affect bus drivers, cafeteria workers, custodians and substitute teachers, among others.

The “living wage” issue does not directly affect teacher salaries. However, Gissendanner said that the division’s goal of having all teacher salaries reach the bottom of the top quartile of its market does not match the division’s goal of becoming world-class.

“The beginning of a fair compensation system would recognize the high costs of living in Albemarle County,” he said, “and would not include counties with much lower costs of living, such as Buckingham and Montgomery, in the selected market.”

The School Board is expected to complete its budget request by Feb 7. The proposal then goes to the Board of Supervisors." (Matt Deegan, The Daily Progress, February 1, 2007)