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FEBRUARY 3 - 9, 2022 | PAGE 7
Superintendent Gives Thanks and Shares Budget Details By Peter Noonan
In the second “winter of our discontent,” the Falls Church City Public Schools has great news to share. This year’s budget looks really good. For those of you who were in The Little City two years ago, you will remember I proposed “the best budget I’ve had a chance to build” since my arrival in the Spring of 2017. The budget had a STEP increase for all eligible employees, a solid cost of living adjustment (COLA), and program growth that would allow us to continue building the outstanding school system our community has come to expect. I am not sure if it was the black cat that crossed my path, the ladder I walked under, or some other superstition I was jinxed by, but…a mere two months later, Covid arrived, and the local, state, and the national economy imploded. The result was millions of dollars of reductions to the Superintendent’s Proposed budget and ultimately operating with less revenue than we had the prior school year. Today is a new day! There’s pentup demand for goods and services. Our community continues to commit to shopping locally. And the real estate market has continued to grow. This past winter and spring, it went “a little crazy.” I know because I, too, bought a house in the city. This growth has put the Schools on a path to recover from two years of budgets that haven’t fully met our needs.
Further, for the fourth year in a row, the Superintendent’s Proposed Budget falls within the guidance that the City Council deliberated and defined in meetings in December and January.
“In the past two years, the positionality of schools has never before been so apparent in a community. The symbiotic relationship between school, work, etc. has come to the fore.”
For background, four years ago, the City Manager and I looked for a way to establish a working budget relationship allowing for a more predictable process — one where the Schools and the General Government would share revenue from the City’s organic growth. Both the City Manager and I have seen the adverse effects of going through budget cycles where there isn’t revenue agreement that “pits” the General Government against the Schools and ultimately creates consternation among our residents. We came to the table to work through the issues and, in the end, developed
a “handshake” revenue-sharing agreement by which the schools and general government will share the local organic growth. Again, this is the fourth year in a row my proposed budget meets the spirit of this agreement; the fourth year in a row, there is little news to make because of conflict in the budgeting process. That history, I hope, is in the past. Ok…so…with fingers and toes crossed that I’m not jinxing it, this year’s budget is the best budget I’ve had the opportunity to build. In January, to our newly minted school board, I proposed a budget that includes a STEP increase for all eligible employees, a 2 percent increase in the COLA, and a “restorative STEP increase” for staff who would have received a STEP increase when the economy tanked. Also included are many supports for our teachers to ensure excellent working conditions because teacher working conditions are student learning conditions. Plus funding to keep up with inflation. In the past two years, the positionality of schools has never before been so apparent in a community. The symbiotic relationship between school, work, economic drivers, mental health, etc., has come to the fore. We have a chance to celebrate and recognize the incredible work of those who have gone “all in” for our students in Falls Church City. I am excited for the opportunity to support our outstanding and hard-working staff for their incredible service through-
Humanity’s Enemies: Trump & Putin Nicholas F. Benton FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS
Imagine. What if? What if Donald Trump had been able to carry out the outrageous schemes we are now learning he was undertaking to keep himself in the White House despite losing the 2020 presidential election? What if Vladimir Putin carries out his current threat to invade Ukraine? These are two “what ifs” that taken together represent the kind of world that, like a parallel universe, sits out there, just beyond our current reality, but threatening to break in on it. This is the dual reality world we now live in, a rare moment in cosmic time when two radically different, monumental options for our future are staring us in the face at once. On the one side, the calmly hero-
ic world that President Biden represents opens the pathway to sustained prosperity and planetary human will. On the other side, the frantic, wild-eyed world of Trump and Putin offers unbelievable chaos and suffering to millions. Humanity faced a similar inflection point in the period following the assassination of Austian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914. At that point, the world chose a pathway of choices that resulted, before it was all over, in the obliteration of the most advanced civilization that humanity had achieved. Each and every one of the tens of millions of precious human lives lost between then and the end of World War II in 1945 – two world wars and a “long weekend” in between – saw mass slaughter on a scale no one could have imagined precipitated by the fevered egomaniacal madness of a handful of members of a single family. Can you imagine? All the key
players in the Great War were at the same event sharing pudding at the coronation of the British King George V in 1911, because all were not hostile adversaries, but in fact closely related? George V, Czar Nicholas of Russia and German Emperor Wilhelm were cousins, in fact. Yet because of them, Western Civilization was dealt a death blow from which to this day it has not fully recovered. Now, we’re on the brink of doing it all over again but with weapons so much more lethal now, it could result in the wiping out entirely of all human civilization as we know it. Can you imagine? Imagine as in the John Lennon song’s vision of a world at peace? Imagine as in the kind of world that humanity’s resilience saw grow out of the excruciating pain of the two world wars to form a United Nations and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a commitment to peaceful
out the pandemic (Ugh…I wasn’t going to say that word in this commentary). Further, this budget presents opportunities to support our students who have struggled academically and emotionally through additional interventionists that are experts. This budget allows us to “see the forest through the trees” and provides an opportunity to build our Secondary Campus program with a vision of becoming a recognized Governor’s School in the coming years. Again, these are all crucial steps to providing the educational quality and excellence we all expect. I want to thank our City Manager, our City Council, our School Board, and the FCCPS staff for finding such positive ways to work in concert together and create a circumstance where we all get what we need at the time that we need it. The community’s investment in shopping and living locally, along with the agreements between the schools and the general government, have made this possible. Let’s emerge from the fog with a renewed enthusiasm for what can be. We must remain visionary and make decisions that move our work forward as a community. Just think; four years ago, we were executing on a vision of a new high school that now shines on the western bluff as a beacon of possibility. Peter Noonan serves as the Superintendent of School for Falls Church City Public Schools. His weekly updates on the school can be found at fccps.org
progress that was exemplified by the historic meeting at the White House last week involving President Biden and retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. It was such a moving event, as the two aging warriors for peace celebrated their decades of hard work and fondness for one another and their shared love for America and democracy. It was beautiful. Breyer, in particular, was particularly, if softly, eloquent. “It’s kind of a miracle that people so different in what they think decide to help solve their differences under law… People have come to accept this Constitution and to accept the importance of the rule of law.” He then said how his wife paid their children to memorize the the Gettysburg Address its 271 words affirming that the U.S. is, as “a new nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…He meant women, too,”
The peace and concord of that event was such a contrast to the angry and violent bile spewed from Trump’s foul mouth at yet another poisonous rally, his overt confession of his intent to overthrow the 2020 election, his utter deceit and contempt for this fellow man, and the threat by Putin that he’s willing to unleash 150,000 troops against innocents in Ukraine, spilling the blood of thousands to achieve an ego-driven military objective that would succeed only by the cruel subjugation of millions of people to tyranny and misery. Why can’t we simply live under the rule of law evenly exercised, to grow old together amid bonds of friendship and love, caring for one another and our well being?
