Covering the Goochland County School Board is always interesting and often a quite lively experience.

Most often the meetings start off with recognitions of students, teachers or schools for noteworthy accomplishments. Last week’s meeting was no different, with each elementary school garnering awards and the county’s five teachers of the year being named, from whom Darlene Martin was named the county’s Teacher of the Year.

Frequently students will be called forward to receive awards for various achievements and it’s always a pleasure to watch them, some shy, some smiling and proud, and to think back to one’s own school days and the pleasure such awards brought.

The hard part comes later on, when the board gets down to business. And by business these days, we’re talking about the hard task of coming up with a school budget during a difficult period, when the board of supervisors has provided less money than the school board requested and allocated the money to categories in different amounts than schools had designated.

Last week Superintendent Linda Underwood made yet another attempt to square the budget with the realities the system faces, announcing proposed reductions to achieve the $629,000 decrease needed.

Several of those recommendations involved the elimination of teaching positions, always a painful decision and even more so after reductions in force last year.

Nevertheless, the board was presented with a plan for their consideration, even though the changes outlined in the budget presentation, presented in a rapid fire fashion, seemed to thwart the intentions of the supervisors, who had added money to instruction and subtracted dollars from administration. When all was said and done, the only positions selected for elimination seemed to be in instruction.

Since the board’s schedule calls for them to vote on a final revised budget at their workshop meeting May 24, imagine our surprise here at the Gazette when we began hearing that individuals in some of those positions slated for elimination in this proposal had received letters of termination two days after the meeting.

We’re left wondering how this can occur before the proposed budget has been approved by the board.

If there is some process by which jobs can be done away with before the school board approves the budget that authorizes these cuts, we’d like to know about it. We’re not lawyers here, nor are we professional school administrators, but it simply defies commonsense to send individuals letters of termination before the budget is approved. Suppose there was an insurrection by the board and the proposed budget was rejected and a new approach demanded, as is the right of the board? What then for the folks who got the termination letters?

Suffice it to say, this budget presentation and the unseemly haste to implement teacher cuts before budget approval has left many questioning the judgment of both the board and the superintendent.

- Ken Odor