School Safety

Many people have called in to the radio, on the shows for Supervisors, for School Board, and again for Sheriffs, bringing up resource officers in the schools. Here is an email I received from April Campbell.

________________________________________________________________________________
Alice,

After listening to your radio show this morning with the
four candidates for sheriff, I found myself in question of
something. I am a student at Lord Fairfax Community College
here in Luray and I also have a 1st grader who attends Luray
Elementary, and another child who will be attending public
school next year. I am a concerned student, parent and
taxpayer in the county of Page. The lack of resource
officers in our schools is something that should be a top
priority and concern for all parents, teachers and
students.

Back to my question: If the county is so interested in
building 2 new schools, are they interested in protecting
the students who will be attending these 2 brand new
schools? And if not, why? Also, what do the board of
supervisors plan on doing to obtain the needed funds for
this project, or do they? If they do, when? Does a child,
student or teacher need to be hurt for someone to wake up
and realize that the protection of our educational
facilities should be a top priority?

To my county supervisor, Charles Hoke, will you be planning
on voting for providing the funds to the newly elected
sheriff of Page County for the protection of our precious
children?

I think that opening up a blog to address this concern,
could be a great asset to finding a solution to this serious
problem.
Thank You

April Campbell

Schools and Money

Topic 5: School Construction and Carryover Funding – Aug 7 Work Session
These are my notes, the notes of one citizen who attended. They are not minutes of the meeting. I post them here, because if you wait for the official minutes to come out, it will be October, and then if there were anything discussed that you wanted to take action about, it will be too late. If anyone was there and had a different take on what happened, just hit the Comments button and add your two cents.

Dr. Thomas reported that the school construction has begun on both high schools. All is well. Everything is on budget.

This is the part I didn’t follow very well. Furniture for the new schools wasn’t included in the operating budget? I might be wrong about that, I couldn’t follow it. There was a grant given, but they didn’t spend it all, and the fiscal year ended in June, so they were giving it back to the county, but they wanted to make sure the county didn’t spend it on something else, like they did the last time this happened.

So the School Board was asking the county to put their leftover grant money aside so it can be used for the purpose it was intended, but just not this year. And they wanted to make sure this money didn’t get “disappeared” into some other category.

That’s what I understood from what I heard, but I was confused.

Alice