School board has a rare moment of frugality | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: No local publication follows the Beaufort County like Board of Education like our friends at the Beaufort Observer.

     The Beaufort County School Board hopefully has finally gotten the message that there is a recession going on. In a rare move of frugality they voted Tuesday (5-17-11) night not to go all out in spending on a project to replace some football bleachers at Washington High School and opted instead to stay within budget...something they have consistently not done in the last few years.

    You can watch the short video of the discussion here:



     Commentary

    Kudos to Terry Williams for standing up for common sense, and to the six other board members who made the right decision. As Mr. Williams points out, it may have been that they could get 600 capacity bleachers cheaper on a per seat basis by doing them all now rather than sticking to the amount of money they had budgeted, but the point he made is well taken: Given the uncertainty of these economic times it is infinitely wiser to have extra money in your bank account than extra seats in a football stadium.

    And we hope the staff will do a better job next time also. We suspect some of the board members were a bit disappointed that the staff did not know the amount of seating capacity they needed and hopefully they'll do a better job of planning before they come in with another "blow the budget" project.

    We continue to believe the standard the board should apply to all of these projects is: "Can this be postponed?" Or "can we do it for less, even if it has to be done before the economy improves?" They did it on this one and we commend them for that. We just hope they will apply the same reasoning going forward.