All three local legislators met over breakfast Friday with members of the Greeneville Board of Education and school system leaders, and talk of budgets predominated.

"It's great to have legislators that have some tenure," School Board Chairman Jerry Anderson said, as all three have moved into leadership positions in the seven years they have been in the legislature.

This year, Anderson said, budget issues are "the biggest thing on everyone's mind."

State Sen. Steve Southerland, R-1st, of Morristown, state Rep. David Hawk, R-5th, of Greeneville, and state Rep. Eddie Yokley, D-11th, of Greene County, each spoke, mostly on budget and education topics.

Much of the meeting was devoted to questions asked by school administrators and principals. (Please see related article.)

Chairman Anderson said that the three legislators were helpful last year in obtaining relief for Greeneville, and all school systems across the state, by extending the working life of school buses, funding items outside the BEP budget, and moving testing dates later in the school year, after state officials had moved them up into March.

Southerland, chairman of the Senate Environment, Conservation and Tourism Committee, began his talk by saying the state budget is "going to be very tight" in 2010, with cuts of at least 9 percent expected.

Revenues have been lower each month than for the same month in the previous year for the past 17 months, he said.

Despite that, Tennessee has positioned itself well, with $550 million left in its "rainy day" fund, despite having to spend about $200 million from that source in 2009.

Southerland has been an advocate of "virtual schools" since soon after entering the legislature, and pointed out that he was told by the superintendent of Unicoi County Schools that a student there is taking Mandarin Chinese through a virtual school program.

Virtual schools allow students to use computers to take classes offered in other parts of the state.

Southerland said the legislature last year allowed lottery-funded "Hope Scholarships" to be used to cover part of the cost of "dual enrollment" of high school students in nearby community colleges, a program that GHS students use to take classes at Walters State that count for credit at both.

During the question-and-answer session, Greeneville High Principal Dr. Linda Stroud said that the law only allows lottery funds to be used to pay for one dual enrollment course per semester.

As a result, she said, some seniors are graduating early and enrolling full-time at Walters State, in order to qualify for more Hope funding.

Students who are still 17 years old should complete high school, she said.

She urged the legislators to consider allowing Hope scholarship money to be used for more dual enrollment courses. Yokley asked Stroud if limiting the increase to high school seniors would be acceptable, and she said it would.

Southerland noted that lottery scholarship funds "are low, at this moment," but said that Stroud's requests was something he could "push for," since a student in a dual enrollment situation, even fully-funded, would cost less than a student on a Hope Scholarship in a university.

State Rep. Hawk noted that although the budget is tight, Tennessee has less debt than any state in the union, less than $700 per person. The state with the next-lowest debt isn't even close, he said, with $1,100 in state debt per individual.

Hawk said that the Greeneville system is known across the state for virtual learning, and pointed out that Beverly Miller, the system's technology coordinator, "gave a tremendous presentation" on the subject in Nashville.

Hawk noted that the SCORE report on education reform in Tennessee, headed by former Senator Bill Frist, M.D., has set a goal of making Tennessee "the number one performing state in the Southeast" in education in five years, but funding will be critical.

Hawk said the SCORE report pointed out that Tennessee already collects some of the best education data "available to anybody," but that data need to be utilized better, and some state mandates "may not be headed in the right direction."

Hawk also noted that new hires at the Volkswagon factory now being built near Chattanooga must have at least an associate's degree "to get a line job."

Hawk said he believes Tennessee must find ways to "empower high school graduates to go on to higher education," but at least initially, "high school graduation is the key."

Rep. Yokley said he heard something that made him think at a recent meeting of the Southern Regional Education Board, to which Gov. Bredesen appointed him.

One of the speakers at a SREB meeting in Atlanta said, "Your job replacement is already in school," Yokley said.

Yokley said that when he graduated from high school in 1970, it was still possible for a high school graduate who was willing to work hard to get a local factory job that would provide a decent living.

"But what can you do today?" he asked. Most of those factories "are gone."

Yokley said it is in the interest of everyone to make sure that students receive enough of the right kind of training to get good jobs, because those students won't be able "to pay your Social Security checks" if they are only making minimum wage.

Turning to the state budget, Yokley said the fiscal review committee was told this week not to expect 2008 levels of revenue to return until 2013. "I hope they're wrong," he said, but revenue collections for the first quarter of the new fiscal year were $100 million lower than a year earlier.

Yokley said he continues to believe that charter schools are not good for rural school districts that are already having a hard time financially, though they may be a good idea elsewhere.

Yokley noted that he voted against requiring paper ballots in the 2010 election, even though it put him out of step with some in his own party.

He said he believes the state saved $30 million by not requiring the ballots next year, and avoided the possibility of spending a great deal of money on voting machines that may be outdated before they are purchased.

Yokley said one dollars-and-sense reason to do everything possible to improve K-12 education is that "remedial education at the university level is costing us a lot of tax dollars."

Eliminating the need for remedial education by improving high school will cost less, he said.

"We're fortunate to have a governor who has been pro-K-12. Yokley said he was pleased that the movement to take recurring money from pre-K education was defeated last year, but predicted it will come up again.

"I personally believe in pre-K," Yokley said.