Growls

A column in today's Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star concludes the "constructive disagreement" between school boards and the localities' governing bodies is a good thing for school budgets. The political elite in Arlington, on the other hand, have developed an arrangement in which the Arlington schools get a percentage, currently 48.1% of all tax revenue. The arrangement, called the revenue sharing agreement, was developed several years ago primarily as a way of controlling the ever increasing share of county revenue that was going to the schools. An advantage of this arrangement is that any resulting discord in developing the schools budget was dramatically minimized. The columnist for the Free Lance-Star admits there is discord between the two governing bodies, but says that with one body pushing to provide "what the schools need while the other struggles to provide what it can afford" the process "works when both groups put real needs above petty disagreements and politics." In Arlington, we see the schools developing a budget that will spend at twice the rate of inflation, which in our view is clear evidence the schools budget is out of control. Consequently, it's time for the County Board to put a fork in the revenue sharing agreement, which one local pundit has called the "split-the-loot deal."