From the Interesting Timing Department: the Waynesboro School Board has a regularly scheduled meeting coming up on Tuesday night.
Details: Waynesboro High School, starts at 6 p.m.
The agenda, naturally, includes an item under “Superintendent’s Report” giving the superintendent, Jeffrey Cassell, time to provide an update on the Westwood Hills shooting.
ICYMI
- Waynesboro: Everything we know at this point about the Westwood Hills shooting
- Waynesboro: Shooter was former student at Westwood Hills Elementary School
- Waynesboro Police release new information on Westwood Hills shooting
That presentation by Cassell will come a couple of items after the public comment section of the meeting.
This would seem to be a good time for the Westwood Hills parents who have been leading a petition drive to get face time with school system administrators to get some things off their chests.
The limitation there being: I would be willing to bet the house on the School Board enforcing rules of order to the effect that, while the public speakers will use their comments to try to ask direct questions of administrators, the meeting rules won’t allow the administrators to answer.
Conveniently.
I wouldn’t expect, either, to hear much in the way of new information on the details of the shooting.
We’ve probably gotten what we’re going to get there, given the way our Waynesboro Police Department likes to keep things under wraps as much as it can get away with.
Nor would I expect anything on the budget issues involved in what it would take to replace windows with bulletproof glass and to replace doors reportedly in desperate need of repair, or the need to make a formal request of Waynesboro City Council to fund school resource officers for every school in the city.
Right now, we have two, with a third in training, for our six public schools.
Two readers have pointed out that I underestimated the final bottom-line costs for three new SROs in my column on that on Friday.
ICYMI
I’d projected three new SROs would cost the city in the range of $160,000 a year, based on our PD offering a starting base salary of $52,682 per year, with a $3,000 signing bonus, and an additional $6,000 bonus for officers who already have Virginia certification.
It’s been pointed out that salary costs only make up, on average, 61.5 percent of the total cost of a government position – the other 38.5 percent is tied to benefits.
Project a cost-per-position of $75,000 per, then, and we get to $225,000 for three additional SROs.
So, $225,000 – the city budget for the current 2026-2027 fiscal year is $167.5 million.
Quick math: $225,000 for three new SROs would be 0.13 percent of our overall budget for the year.
One percent is a penny on the dollar; 0.13 percent is a penny on a penny on the dollar.
I’d like to see some work on the SROs, and also on the bulletproof glass and the faulty doors.
Maybe the superintendent could include something on these matters in his report on the shooting?
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Chris Graham
