Our Schools are Headed for The Perfect Storm | Eastern North Carolina Now

    School board candidates should tell us how they intend to weather that storm

     If there was a Category 5 hurricane a hundred miles off our coast and headed straight for Beaufort County would you expect our School Board to to preparing for it?

    There is a "perfect storm" coming for our schools and our local Board of Education is still playing like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand. As this article documents, the root cause of the impending storm is the exhaustion of Federal Stimulus dollars going to public school systems across the nation. Most of those dollars are scheduled to begin to taper off after next October (FY 2012). Already we are seeing a decline in those dollars going to state governments, a source that North Carolina depended on this past year.

    But revenue at the state level is below budget projections but what is worse is that they are not expected to improve anytime soon .

    Now, on top of all of that - as if it were not bad enough already for the schools - we hear talk in Washington about addressing the deficit problem. As we speak the Senate is on the verge of passing a "Pay as you go" bill that is designed to reduce deficit spending. But there are very few places in the Federal budget that allow for discretionary spending cuts. But education is one of those areas.

    The Tea Party (Taxed Enough Already) movement simply ads to the likelihood that things are not going to go well for education over the next couple of years. The backlash that has seen President Obama's approval ratings tank and playing a role in recent off-year elections would argue that legislators in both Raleigh and Washington are not going to be attuned to more "bailouts," even for schools.

    Yet our school board just keeps on spending every dime it can scrounge up as if money grows on trees.

    At the Building and Grounds meeting last week the committee approved adding to the cost of the Tayloe gym project by relying on money that had been generated from another source. They are now spending almost every dime they have in capital outlay and have left virtually nothing for emergencies that always happen in maintaining a dozen campuses. And very little of that capital outlay money has been spent in maintenance but rather on trophies pushed by certain school board members for pet projects in their district.

    And as we've said before, all this comes on top of the School Board overspending the $33 million bond issue by $6.4 million dollars and wasting over $15 million since the building of Southside.

    So while our existing schools suffer from not being properly maintained, the School Board spends like it has an unlimited supply of money. it is doing nothing to plan for how it is going to weather The Perfect Storm.

    There is an election coming up in May. Voters should look long and hard at how those running have managed the taxpayers' money thus far and what plans they have to getting us through what is obviously going to be the toughest financial times since the Great Depression.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.