Wisenheimers sometimes note that, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
And when you’re an aspiring School Board member, apparently there’s no problem that can’t be solved with an infusion of more cash.
The four contenders for the Democratic endorsement for two open Arlington School Board seats made their pitches April 24 at a forum sponsored by the Arlington County Civic Federation. The event engendered the expected litany of complaints from the candidates about state education funding, plus some calls to change how the county government funds its share of school costs.
It’s a common refrain of candidates for School Board posts in Arlington and across Virginia, which don’t have independent taxing authority and as a result can compile spending wish lists they know likely never will materialize.
The current crop of candidates offered their own individual takes, but largely stuck to the more-money mantra.
“We have to rework the entire way our budget is shaped,” said Zuraya Tapia-Hadley, one of the four seeking the Democratic endorsement in voting to take place in mid-May. She suggested the school system should develop a list of its needs first, then hand them over to the County Board.
The idea of a needs-based budget also resonated with Chen Ling, who in January was first out of the gate in seeking to succeed Cristina Diaz-Torres and David Priddy, each of whom is departing after a single four-year term.
“We don’t have enough revenue,” Ling said, saying the state and local governments should provide more.
Kathleen Clark, another contender, did address the elephant in the room, acknowledging that Arlington Public Schools lost students in droves during a protracted COVID shutdown, and that projections once showing continuous student growth well into the future have now largely been discounted.
“Understandably, many people ask why schools need so much money with fewer students,” Clark said.
She did have something of an answer at the ready: The school system has been surviving by dipping into reserve funds, which are now mostly depleted, Clark said.
She blamed poor messaging to the public from school leadership on the needs of the school system, and said School Board members must press for the funding support to “operate our school system the way it should be operated.”
For the past two decades, the county government (which through taxpayer cash funds more than 70% of school operations) has given Arlington Public Schools a defined percentage of total county tax revenues. The system is designed to eliminate the battle-royales that occasionally transpire in other jurisdictions, including neighboring Fairfax County, between elected school boards and elected boards of supervisors.
Even though Arlington tax revenues have ballooned to stratospheric levels – as many a homeowner will attest – the appetite for school spending often seems to outstrip available resources. (Some years ago, a newspaper analysis found that Arlington spent more per student than was spent by the school district servicing Beverly Hills, Calif.)
The spend-spend-spend mantra seemed to peak under Superintendent Robert Smith, who in his defense had inherited a school district that had underspent on improvements and new facilities to address what was then a fast-rising student body.
Some fiscal restraint came during the early years of Superintendent Patrick Murphy, but eventually the spending spigot was turned to full blast once again.
At the Civic Federation forum, there were occasional moments stressing a degree of fiscal restraint.
Larry Fishtahler, the only candidate among the four to have run for School Board before, suggested a wide range of options should be presented for capital projects. Critics long have contended that School Board members may talk about austerity, but never met a construction proposal they didn’t want to turn into the Taj Mahal.
To stay fiscally responsible, “you’re going to have to look at everything – all reasonable things,” when it comes to capital spending, Fishtahler said.
The looming departures of Diaz-Torres and Priddy after but a single term each represents another bout of short-termer-ism on the School Board. The five members to occupy the dais beginning in January will represent a complete turnover from those sitting there in December 2020.
While School Board seats in Virginia are officially nonpartisan, political parties can and often do “endorse” candidates rather than formally nominate them. All five current Arlington School Board candidates won the Democratic endorsement prior to winning general-election victories; Fishtahler was the last Democrat to be defeated for School Board, losing in 2003 to incumbent independent David Foster.
Democrats will select their two endorsees through a ranked-choice-voting format. The general election will be conducted via the traditional winner(s)-take-all voting, with the top two vote-getters receiving the seats.
Waiting in the wings for the eventual Democratic endorsees is James “Vell” Rives IV, running as an independent. He twice before sought School Board posts, but in Arlington the power of the Democratic sample ballot overwhelmed him as it has many others.
The arrival of two new board members in 2025 could mark the beginning of the end for the tenure of current Superintendent Francisco Durán, one veteran political insider recently intimated.
The reasoning behind the prognostication? All five board members who plucked Durán from relative obscurity in neighboring Fairfax County in 2020 will be gone from the board in 2025, and under this theory, the new board likely will want to make its own choice as they move into the future.
Hired not long after COVID sent schools into lockdown in 2020, Durán’s tenure has been marked by turnover among the central-administration ranks, discontent among school-based personnel, a calamitous health-insurance switch, a consultant’s report suggesting the school system’s payroll system had spiraled out of control and a proposal, quickly abandoned by the School Board after public pressure, to use Nottingham Elementary school as “swing space” during years of capital-improvement projects at other elementaries.
