Insanity by the Beaufort County School Board | Eastern North Carolina Now

It has been said that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”  By that definition, the Beaufort County Schools is operated insanely.

I have not written about the Beaufort County School Board for several years, believing that, somehow, things would get better. But things in our school system are worse and getting worse.  There are several issues that are important to the public.   Among these are; a high level of secrecy about Board operations and school activities, student discipline, very low evaluation grades of several schools, corrupt practices involving board members and commissioners, and failure operate school business with transparency.  For example, failure to video of Board meetings for presentation on television, etc.

Then the board is noted for the arrogance of sending the public/press out into the hall in the middle of a public meeting ostensibly to protect privacy rights of employment discussions and decisions rather than dealing with personnel issues at the end of the public meeting.  But it works effectively.  Most of the public and even the press leave when they are sent out in the hall while the board huddles behind closed doors.  Why do they do such things?   It would appear that the reason they do so is because the business that is conducted “after they return to public session” is not witnessed by those who refuse to stand outside and wait so as to see the entire public meeting.  So by putting the closed-door part of the meeting in the middle they get to hide whatever they do after the doors are re-opened.  Perhaps there is a rational reason for doing this, but to my knowledge that reason has never been explained.  Thus, I and many others believe the real reason is to send a message to the public that the Superintendent and Board do not want the public meaningfully involved in school business. Ever wonder why this is?

For about two years the Beaufort County Better Government Committee and the Conservative Club’s Curriculum Committee has requested that the School Board return to the practice of videoing meetings for television.  The School Board has refused to film meetings, giving lame excuses like, “technical difficulties” and the inability to procure equipment.  No other Boards who film meetings have these problems.  To give these excuses for almost two years is just another indication of insanity. This Board does not want the public to know how they conduct the public’s business.  Further proof is the way they severely restrict the right of the public to address the Board in the Public Comments section of the agenda. Regardless of the reason, the effect of this practice is to communicate to the public that they should just mind their own business and leave the operation of our schools to the staff and school board.

Yet another example that exposes this superintendent and board’s lack of transparency is the failure to insure an adequate sound system so those in attendance and watching when they do record the meetings can hear what is being said.  Considering how much money they have spent outside the classroom in recent years, they could have bought a state of the art sound system if they wanted the public to know what is going on.

During the joint meeting between the School Board and the County Commissioners on October 18 the Board admitted there are school discipline problems in our schools but cited laws that restrict them from discussing certaom issues or individual examples.  At the October 18 meeting the Board failed miserably to present any enlightenment about how their discipline system works.  There are complaints about criminal behavior, gangs and students who are not adequately controlled. There was no discussion about the impact that the lack of discipline has on students who do behave and want to learn or on teachers who are constantly expressing to me that they have left the system do to pervasive misbehavior of students. It seemed to me that the School Board is more interested in covering up discipline incidents than in presenting a program to encourage parents and the public in how to support acceptable school discipline.

Without fundamental systemic changes the problem gets worse. Surprise, surprise.

Commissioner Deatherage made a plea to the School Board for the aggressive management of discipline with more cooperation between the School Board and the County Commissioners.  Commissioner Deatherage offered that increasing the budget to cover the legal expenses of the School Board to counter the legal blocks to good discipline could help with the problem.  As far as I can see, offers for Commissioners to work with the School Board fell on deaf ears.

If there are laws currently on the books that hinder effective student conduct, then I am quite sure our legislators would be more than happy to entertain introducing needed solutions in the Legislature if the School Board and County Commission make proposals that would untie their hands.

Then there is the dismal failure of Beaufort County Schools (taken as a whole) when judged by the State Department of Education rating system.  Bear in mind, while reading this, that the State has lowered evaluation standards regularly, during the past 30 years.  This is because of the State-wide lowering of academic standards.  By lowering standards, many school systems appear to be teaching at acceptable levels, but they actually are not.  This system of lowering standards protects weak teachers, superintendents and school boards. Surprise, surprise.

 Beaufort County has 7 out of 12 schools that scored as low as 42 out of 100 points and got a “D” rating (the lowest passing grade) on the State’s school evaluation system. This is another indicator of the insanity of what is going on in Beaufort County. We have one school, Early College, that is rated “A” with a grade of 95. That is a spread of 43 points to between the lowest performing to the top performing school.  One must ask,   “What are the other 7 schools doing wrong?”  Chocowinity Primary School has a grade of “B,”  Northside  High School and Bath Elementary School have grades of  “C.”  No explanation was given about programs to improve ratings other than they are “working on it” and “Covid must have done it.”  Excuses rather like:  “the dog ate my homework.”  And remember, this low performance was going on before Covid.

The way our school superintendents, staff and school board have used performance statistics is insane.  They typically try to spin slight increases as indicators of improvement.  Yet no school board member to my knowledge has every asked:   “at that rate of improvement how many more generations of students will suffer unacceptable performance before we achieve an acceptable level of composite performance?”  Just one more example of insanity in our school system.  No wonder they focus more on hiding the poor performance from the public than on fixing it.

This unacceptably high proportion of very low performing schools indicates imbedded systemic problems in the culture of education in Beaufort County Schools. When was the last time you heard a school board member defend this culture using words like “excellence,”  “high quality” or the assertion that our schools compare well against “the best” schools in the state or nation?  When was the last time you heard a superintendent talk about the National Assessment of Education Progress?  Do these problems come from the top or are they latent in the teaching staff?  I would posit that the fundamental problem here is the lack of high expectations in the top leadership, not most of our teachers.

Corrupt practices involving inappropriate relationships among the School Board Chairman, Vice Chairman, Superintendent, the Beaufort County Commissioner Chairman, Vice Chairman and Manager.  These six people seem to think they can get in a back room and settle issues, bring them to the two Boards and get approval votes.  The reason they think they can get away with this corrupt practice is that they do get away with it!  This system has worked well for them to hide serious low performance during past years. It does not serve the public at all. This backroom dealing is simply a way to avoid compliance with the spirit and intent of the Open Meetings Law in North Carolina. What are they trying to hide?   Turns out, plenty.

When I have talked about corrupt practices in the past some of those mentioned try to confuse the subject of corruption by saying they are being accused of being dishonest in money handling.  That is not usually what I am saying.  There are many other forms of corruption in government.  Corruption as I am using term means:   Systemic failures when government functions in a way it should not function. It is like flawed computer code that is corrupt and does not function as it should. To ignore a pervasive problem of poor student discipline is a corruption of the duty to provide a safe and orderly environment and teach students to obey rules.  It is corruption for school leaders to not level with the public about the low performance of a majority of our students/schools.  When was the last time you heard a school board member talk about students in BCS being selected for prestigious scholarships like the Morehead and Nation Merit?

Above all else it is corruption when the amount of taxpayer money being spent on our schools goes up multiples more than does student performance.  And it is corruption when the leaders of our school system accept the unacceptable, which then becomes acceptable.  I challenge our Superintendent and School Board leaders to convince the taxpayers we do not have a race to the bottom in performance while we have a race to the top in spending.  We simply cannot afford to allow this to continue.  Is it any wonder parents are fleeing the public schools for home-schooling and private schools?

The manipulation of the two boards works well because of the Democrat-RINO vote on the Board of County Commissioners and the “We all have to stick together because we work for the Superintendent mentality on the School Board”.  This is simply corruption of these two boards. 

The Board of Commissioners fund the Board of Education and have a duty to know where and how that more than 17 million dollars is being spent and what results it achieves.  Commissioners do not know how the money is spent.  Efforts to get answers are shut down by the RINOs and Democrats on the Board of County Commissioners.

The School Board has applied for a grant of lottery money to build a new school they estimate to cost $52 million dollars.  Beaufort County taxpayers would have to pay 11 million of the total.  The Board of Education wants to build a new school at the Eastern Elementary site.  They propose to house about eleven hundred students ranging in age from 5 to about 10 years.  They would shut down the current John Cotton Tayloe and the Eastern Elementary facilities.  

This is a really bad idea.  Both these buildings are adequate for our present needs.  We have a declining school population.  The last credible facilities study of the Beaufort County Schools was done about 10 years ago and showed that only half of the school space was being used as it was designed for.   We had about 900 more students then than we do now, so the situation is even worse today. Why waste money simply because it is available or free?  The taxpayers should vote on this spending as a bond issue.

This is a bad idea for another very important reason.  Why would anyone want to continue to consolidate schools with the terrible performance of our already consolidated schools.  There are many who believe school consolidation has been a dismal failure nationally, not just here in Beaufort County.  Insanity is continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results.

This is also a bad idea because young children (4-5 year olds) do not need to be placed in huge institutional buildings with older students.  It can terrify a small child.  Any time large numbers of people, of any age, are forced to congregate together a lot of social issues are created. On the other side of the coin, children who have unique needs tend to get lost and ignored in large systems.  One wonders if our superintendent and school board bosses have looked at reducing cross-town bussing to bunch all these kids together in one place. Since merger, the Washington Attendance Area has operated one of the most inefficient busing programs in this part of the state.  Every day we bus hundreds of children past very usable buildings to facilities further from their home and then turn around and bus they the opposite direction in later years.  It makes no sense (except to achieve racial balance).  Smaller, community-based schools make much more sense to me than mega-facilities and busing.

If we are interested in improving the quality of education and therefore excellence in student learning, we need to consider neighborhood schools with school choice.  It is much more comforting to a child and his parents to know he will attend the same, smaller, more stable, neighborhood school for 8 years.  I am willing to take some of this grant money to look at neighborhood schools based on a PK-8 grade configuration.  I am not willing to harm small children by having them attend these large institutions of very limited learning and having to ride school buses longer times to get there and back home.  Since what we have been doing does not seem to have worked very well perhaps this School Board should consider doing things differently.

There is more but we will address some of these other issues, such as “Woke Curriculum and instructional practices,” in future articles.

We need good school board candidates to run for those seats up for election in the 2024 election.  Candidates must file during December of 2023.  We need to make changes in our School Board and Board of County Commissioners for many reasons in addition to those presented above.  There are five School Board seats and four Commissioner seats available for the 2024 elections.  If you are interested in running for one of these seats, call 252-943-5939 for assistance from the Conservative Club.  Calling either the Democrat or Republican Parties is not advisable because they tend to look after their incumbents.

Insanity is continuing to do what you have been doing and expecting better results.   It is time to elect a school board and County Commissioner majority that will make some needed changes in our schools.