Babur Lateef used the School Board Chairman candidate forum to name drop

Lateef, the Prince William County School Board Chairman, At-large was not shy of saying the names of fellow Democrats also running for the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, the taxing authority that provides funding for the schools. He’s led the School Board overseeing Virginia’s second-largest school system in Prince William County for the past 16 months.

“We need more funding from the Board of County Supervisors and we’re not getting it due to Jeanine Lawson (sitting Brentsville District rep) and Ruth Anderson (sitting Occoquan District rep) who are not committed to our classrooms,” he said at Wednesday night’s Prince William Committee of 100 / League of Women Voters voter forum in Manassas.

His opponent, Alyson Satterwhite, who’s supported by county Republicans, said she’d support changing up the funding mechanism for the school division — an automatic 57% revenue transfer from the county government to the School Board. In recent years, however, the Board of County Supervisors has given $21 million in additional funding to the schools.

But she also accused Lateef of turning this school board race — which under state law prohibits candidates from affiliating themselves with political parties — into a hyper-partisan exercise.

“We’re working for kids. Students don’t have an ‘R’ or a ‘D’ next to there name. When you’re advocating for students, you have to work with everyone,” she said.

On talking points, Lateef stuck with improving safety at school buddings by improving infrastructure and adding to the ranks of 47 new school counselors hired to monitor students’ mental health.

He assured the audience that the school system spends the tax dollars wisely, investing them in teacher salary raises. He said the Board of County Supervisors needed to hike the computer and peripheral (data center) tax, and/or make cuts in order to increase funds to the county school division, which boasts 92,000 students, with a $4 billion budget this year. The increased funding would put the county on par with school systems in Fairfax and Arlington, that spend more per pupil that Prince William.

Satterwhite called for improving state Standards of Learning (SOL) tests scores in the county while reducing the number of standardized tests administered during the school year.

“There’s a lot of talk about our SOL score results and how we did better than the state. But the state scores went down,” said Satterwhite.

Lateef was appointed interim School Board in March 2018 after the sudden resignation of Chairman At-large Ryan Sawyers.

Last fall, Satterwhite unsuccessfully challenged Lateef for the seat, to complete Sawyers’ term.

Lateef’s win last year was followed by protests by county Republicans who went to Richmond accusing a former top county Democratic of intentionally confused voters by erecting signs for a third-party candidate.

Voters will head to the polls on Tuesday, November 5.