Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science (Volume 30)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: funds. The county supervisors are notoriously adverse to raising salaries. This amendment further provides that the county supervisors or the city council may not change a superintendent's salary during the term for which he is elected, though the school board may.1 This is an excellent provision. Supervisors or councilmen, for retrenchment or for political reasons, may not injure the school system, but the school board is free to reward a deserving superintendent. And there is little danger that the school board will be extravagant in its rewards. District Trustees.?Each of the five hundred and eleven school districts of the State has a board of three trustees. The county trustee electoral boards annually elect one trustee for each district of their respective counties for a term of three years; these trustees serve without pay, excepting the clerks of the district boards, who, according to law, may be allowed, out of the district fund, an amount not exceeding three dollars for each teacher. The trusteeship in Virginia has never been of sufficient honor to attract a great number of progressive, educated men, and for this reason the need of well-paid division superintendents is felt the more. Some of the progressive councils of small towns have overcome the difficulty by paying the chairman of the school board a sum in excess of the three dollars for each teacher. For instance, Woodstock, a town of fourteen hundred inhabitants, has wonderfully improved its public schools by paying the clerk of its school board $100 annually. In this case the clerk is both efficient and interested. Of course, in this plan, as in any other plan where the incumbent devotes only a portion of his time to the work, there is danger of the clerkship's becoming a sinecure. Teachers.?Although th...