Mathews County School Board members fielded questions on a wide variety of topics—everything from possible budget cuts to reduce operational costs, to student use of cell phones in the classroom—during a town hall meeting Monday night in the Mathews High School auditorium.

In the roughly two-hour meeting, the second town hall of the 2022-2023 academic year, school board members also disagreed with one another about the extent of their own hands-on involvement in school operations.

The meeting began with a question from Tricia Stall, who asked what areas the school board can target to reduce costs in order to ease the burden on county taxpayers.

Superintendent of Schools Nancy Welch said that over the past three years she has been looking closely at personnel—not just teachers, but also teacher assistants, maintenance workers, custodians, others—with an eye to reducing costs. Over that time, she said, about 13-14 positions were left vacant after personnel either retired or lef...