Comments for Political Scene About to Make Major Reset in Beaufort County | Eastern NC Now

Concerned Taxpayer: I have NOT voted once in the affirmative on the myriad votes to originate and construct this "boondoggle," except to allow the trade for land to save the Beaufort County taxpayers $500,000.00, which was summarily voted down by the Center Left Coalition, those who always prefer to soak the Beaufort County taxpayer whenever possible, while swapping votes to share power.

My conditional vote at this point would not mean much; however, change in leadership is necessary at this time in so many points of origin here in Beaufort County.

Commented: Thursday, April 24th, 2025 @ 7:35 am By: Stan Deatherage

John Valley: The money will run out; it is running out now: $10,500,00 so far for an unneeded school; $5,000,000.00 for special projects, at the whim of the Center Left Coalition, in just one year.

The money will not last forever ... Not unless the Center Left Coalition raises taxes on the People.

To the Public at Large: Watch the Center Left Coalition closely to see how and when they waste your treasured tax dollars here in a Revaluation Year.

Commented: Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025 @ 11:33 pm By: Stan Deatherage

Something to consider:

Unlike many school systems, the San Antonio TX area's 19 school districts function as separate, independent entities. Each has its own superintendent, its own elected board of education, and its own taxing authority.
It covers an area of 466.7 square miles. I'm stressing the square mile factor, not the population factor.

Beaufort County has 3 school district with ONE superintendent covering an area of 962.8 square miles. Shouldn't Beaufort County have more than one Superintendent?

Lastly wouldn't a local citizen who is educated, make a more qualified superintendent than someone who ISN'T local? Cheaper too.

P.S. I'm still waiting to learn if Gary intends to "fight" for the public records he requested a year ago.

Commented: Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025 @ 7:24 pm By: Washingtonian

What I am hearing is that one or more on the central office staff have been threatening school board members that if they do not support Cheeseman on closing Snowden, schools in their districts will have popular teachers removed. If that is happening, then the paid staff is blackmailing the school board. Anyone doing that should be fired for cause and school board members need to go public with it.

Commented: Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025 @ 8:23 pm By: Rino Hunter

Cheeseman has selected a construction firm with an extensive history of cost overruns in school construction. He will be long gone to his next job before those chickens come home to roost. Indeed there is an FBI investigation ongoing in Beaufort County, South Carolina over this same firm's cost overruns/

Maybe that is why he wants to close Snowden. He is freeing up some money to cover those expected cost overruns on his pet project.

This school is also being built on the lowest part of the lot. That will prove real smart when hurricanes come along and it floods, won't it?

And Gary, do you condone Cheeseman's gross mismanagement over that missing 4 acres? How about his half million dollar solution to his blunder when it could have been done with a property swap without costing that half million dollars to the taxpayers.

Cheeseman's pet project will prove a total boondoggle from start to finish. That grant from the lottery fund could have been used MUCh more effectively for our schools.

Commented: Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025 @ 9:43 am By: Concerned Taxpayer

Gary, it is not at all conservative to approach school needs with the tunnel vision employed by Cheeseman and knuckled under to by a weak school board. There should have been a thorough and public analysis of school needs and solutions and opportunities for public input. There was not. There was only Cheeseman's plan, designed primarily to build his resume for his next job. Both fact finding and public input were shoved to the side.

A plan based on two neigborhood sized K-5 schools, using Tayloe, an existing school for one of them, would have freed funds for other schools around the county. Chocowinity was overlooked in the last major bond issue for schools, and Cheeseman has just overlooked them again.

The process stunk to high heaven in this school project, which was driven by one bureaucrat. The result of that flawed process is suboptimal for our school system.

Gary, why have you become such a Cheeseman cheerleader? And why have you jumped on the liberal school consolidation bandwagon?

Commented: Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025 @ 7:47 am By: John Steed

And for the record ... all my posting on this subject is in regard to the new school not Snowden.

Commented: Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025 @ 1:09 am By: Gary Ceres

Mr. Ceres, I can support some of your findings but disagree slightly with your conclusion regarding what I consider Cheeseman’s resume bullet, the consolidated school being built in Washington, and the folly of closing the S. W. Snowden school in Aurora. Like you, I also attended a large high school with a student population of more than 2,000 students that was ranked among the top 100 high schools in the nation. This was a public school in central Florida. The student to teacher ratio was about 25 students per classroom although the advanced/gifted classes tended to be slightly smaller. I believe this smaller student to teacher ratio directly correlated to the success of the graduates. I attended a college that had a smaller student population than my high school and even smaller student to professor ratios on average. I believe this directly contributes to the quality of education received by the students.

When it comes to community schools and the importance of keeping them close to where students reside, I believe that is necessary just as the ability to retain those smaller student/teacher ratios is vital. My high school was fed from three elementary schools which fed into two middle schools. These schools were located within the communities they served, the students could walk or ride their bikes to school. Start times were offset to facilitate the best interest of the students and their pre- and after- school activities. I believe we can both agree that this model of education better serves communities, parents and most importantly students better than consolidated schools, regardless of student/teach ratios, that are located outside of the communities they serve. I would also posit that unfortunately, the education you and I received 30 or so years ago was superior to what is currently being taught and the standards children are being held to in today’s public education system. We can look at the vast increase (88% in administrative bureaucracy vs. 8-10% in student/teacher population growth) over the past 25 years as cause for the symptoms we are seeing in today’s public schools. The article points to the fact we have less parental involvement or awareness of what is being taught to our children. It is more difficult for parents to be involved, especially in our county where most folks have to work long hours and aren’t able to be as involved as they would like to be because schools have been removed from the communities they serve.

As far as large, consolidated schools and high student/teacher ratios, I lived in Charleston, S.C. prior to moving back home to Beaufort County. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, issue that led to my decision to move back home was the terrible state of education in Charleston. Schools were located within 10 miles of where anybody lived. However, while there were several (2-3) elementary and middle schools, there was only one high school. This was a result of a lack of competence, future planning ability, or just negligence on the part of the local school board, town and county governments. The average student to teacher ratio in the elementary schools was 30 students per teacher. My children had to get on a bus at 5:45 in the morning and didn’t get home until after 4:00 in the afternoon because of the number of stops and amount of traffic in the area. This was insane! I also had to explain to my kindergarten children what it meant to have “two daddies or mommies” because this was being taught in school. I have lived this before and left to get my family away from this indoctrination and consolidation. Now I see it repeating itself here in Beaufort County. The line must be drawn, and common sense must prevail.

Concerning fiduciary responsibility, Cheeseman spent close to an hour of what should have been a public hearing justifying the need to close Snowden based solely on money. I don’t believe this to be true. In fact, I don’t believe Cheeseman really cares at all about the success of Beaufort County Schools or our students. Remember that we had zero (0) underperforming schools in our county prior to him becoming superintendent. On his watch, we saw that number climb to eight ( underperforming schools that fortunately through the hard work and dedication of our teachers (not county administrators) has dropped to six (6) which is still an abysmal track record on Cheeseman’s part. Remember also that Cheeseman is required by state statute to receive a performance review due to the number of underperforming schools in our county and that the weak school board has failed to provide this to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI). This is a violation of state statute, illegal to call it what it really is and this has been proven through public records requests as mentioned in other articles in the Observer. However, I digress. The school board under Cheeseman’s guidance or by his decision alone, have sent numerous contracts out of the county for higher dollar expenditures. These include grounds maintenance, BCS website development/maintenance, the school board attorney (a Durham based attorney who is head of the Democratic Party and also represents DPI, if that isn’t a conflict of interest) and others. Why are we sending contracts out of county for more money? Is it corruption, kick-backs or some other reason. I mentioned this at the public hearing last week and asked for Cheeseman to please provide those answers as well as a few others at the next public hearing. I won’t hold my breath on that. I also questioned why we don’t have a grant writer on staff at BCS? We used to have one. Wouldn’t that position be worth the investment as they could actively seek out funding that Cheeseman says we need but can’t get and better serve our county schools? If the school board or Cheeseman were anything but incompetent, wouldn’t they have realized the need to build a consolidated school, somewhere between Aurora and Chocowinity prior to now and used the lottery funds for that endeavor? Many folks may not know but I stated to anyone who would listen that Snowden would be closed the minute the funding became available to build the mega-school in Washington. Unfortunately, I am afraid that scenario may come to fruition. School consolidation, as well as the effort to bring leftist curricula into our schools seems to be Cheeseman’s preferred modus operandi. Look at where he bragged about having built his resume last week: New Jersey, Philadelphia, California and other left leaning, blue states before coming here. Beaufort County cannot afford the likes of him, culturally or financially if our future and the futures of our children are truly important, and I would argue they are most important. Not the resume bullets Cheeseman hopes to get before moving on to another higher paying job at a larger school district somewhere else. This weak school board needs to grow a spine, listen to their constituents and start doing what is right for our citizens and county. It’s not hard. If they don’t want to do the work, the door is always open for them to resign or quit and let others who actually care about our students and communities take on the yoke of leadership themselves. If not, we better vote them out come reelection time because we cannot afford their corruption, waste, fraud, abuse and incompetence anymore!

Commented: Monday, April 21st, 2025 @ 11:35 pm By: David Hudson

If we have any problem in public education, and I am not saying that we do, the way to fix it is more new school buildings because students learn better in brand new school buildings.

Commented: Monday, April 21st, 2025 @ 8:54 pm By: Big Bob 2.0

Conservatives have pushed for neighborhood schools and community schools for decades while the liberal education establishment has pushed their mantra of consolidation into bigger and bigger schools. At the high school level, where it means more electives can be offered, that might carry some weight but not at the elementary school level Children adapt better in smaller environments in the early years. This is also a period whenf parental involvement is also much more important. When parents live closer to a smaller community school this enhances their ability to be more involved with their children's education. Of course with some of the crap crammed into today's curriculum, the liberal education establishment may not want parents around to become aware of what they are putting in kids heads.

Big cities are more densely populated, so a neighbor school area would likely encompass more students, but Beaufort County is rural and that is not the case here. The insane attendance area that Cheeseman is pushing south of the river would have very young children having to ride a bus two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, and create difficulties for parents going to the school for teacher conferences, PTO meetings, and the like.

Lets look at "Cheeseman's Folly" the Washington mega elementary school. There are statutory processes that Cheeseman was supposed to go through, under the law on that project but he failed to do that. Why? To blindside taxpayers and parents so he could do what he thought would look best on his resume for his next job.

Instead of one big mega K-5 school, it would be better to have two more reasonably sized elementaries that would be closer to parents and students. One understands some of the design drawbacks of the present Eastern Elementary, but John Cotton Tayloe could be used as one of two smaller K-5 elemtary schools. That would save constrution costs because the new K-5 would be smaller. Good planning would locate that new smaller elementary west of Wasington, where population projections say most of the county's growth will be. The attendance areas for each would be smaller, facilitating more parent involvement and less exhaustion of schoolchildren by long bus rides.

Commented: Monday, April 21st, 2025 @ 6:27 pm By: Conservative Voter

Gary: The essential key to making that whole "property tax limitation" work is locating and cutting "waste, fraud and abuse" here in Beaufort County. The public schools are making terrible decisions, which are costing way too much money to educate children in an environment where they are losing students, ergo, "waste, fraud and abuse."

This is a time when management is most important, because when one governs as a body politic of the State of North Carolina, as is the county commissioners, it eventually comes down to the math and the management, accordingly, this necessary tandem is failing on the school board, and with the Center Left Coalition - those who swap votes to share power - it often unrealized on the Board of Beaufort County Commissioners.

Commented: Monday, April 21st, 2025 @ 3:08 pm By: Stan Deatherage