Is S 236 about power games or is it about promoting good planning? | Eastern North Carolina Now

        Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    The games grown people play are amazing at times. One such time is that going on now between the Beaufort County Board of Education and the County Commission. It is ostensibly being waged over S 236. You'd think, from some of the rhetoric, that if the bill passes the sun would begin to rise in the west and set in the east. But in reality the bill makes little or no difference, except in a couple of ways. And beyond the changes, all the bill does is provide that the county commission could someday exercise the authority contained in the bill. We can't find a county commissioner who is now in favor of exercising the authority the bill would provide. So, what's all the hullabaloo?

    The bill essentially provides that the county commission can adopt a resolution to take responsibility for some or all of the school facilities in the county. But in reality they already have that responsibility simply because they must appropriate the money the school board spends for school facilities.

    The technical difference comes in where the bill would make it a one-step decision making process rather than a two-step process. Now, boards of education must request funding for whatever they want to do about facilities. The commissioners can choose to appropriate the funding or not. But once they appropriate the money the board of education is not bound to spend it the way they told the commissioners they planned to spend it.

    An example is what the Beaufort County Board of Education did on the $33 million school bond issue. Once the voters approved the bonds and the commissioners authorized the sale of the bonds the school board (actually it was mostly the former superintendent) spent the money where and how he wanted to spend it. As a result, the projects in the bond package approved by the voters went $6.4 million over budget. But it should also be said that the county commission at that time approved, on the infamous 5-2 votes, those budget overruns. So one might ask: What changes with S 236?

    The answer is that the board of education would lose some discretionary authority over what is done with the money once the commissioners appropriate it to the school system.

    But there are two differences in the bill that would be significant changes. The first is why the bill came into being in the first place.

    That change would move the authority for selecting sites for new schools from the school board to the county commissioners. That grew out of a dispute between the Wake County Board of Education and Commissioners several years ago when the school board took the money the county appropriated for a new school and then bought land that was much more expense than what the commissioners were first told it would cost.

    And low and behold, there are two examples of such in Beaufort County. The first is Southside and the other is Northeast Elementary. In both cases the school board selected sites that most observers at the time would have said the county commission would not have selected. Some contend the school board paid too much for the Southside property and that Northeast should not have been built on property not suited for a large building. Just recently the current school board had to spend thousands of dollars trying to save water damage to the building because the site does not drain properly. Whether the county commission would have made a better choice of sites than the school board did is, of course, subject to debate, but what is not in doubt to an objective observer, is that the site the school board selected was a bad choice.

    But the second change S 236 would make that is of major significance is the provision that the school board, under the bill, could not file a lawsuit against the county if it did not think the commissioners were providing enough money. And as anyone who has followed school matters in Beaufort County knows, the school board did sue the county while they hide over a million in a fund that could have been used for what they were suing for. Under S 236 that would not happen, at least not in relation to money for school facilities.

    Whether S 236 is retaliation by the commission against the school board for that law suit is, of course, open to conjecture, just as it is conjecture to talk about all the changes and "problems" that would be created by the adoption of S 236.

    Passing S 236 would not change anything. What it would do is offer the possibility for a change in how school facilities are handled if the commissioners found at some date in the future that the school board was not doing the job the commissioner felt they should be doing.

    Commentary

    S 236 is a good idea. It is not just a good idea, it is an excellent idea.

    As it is now, a school board can do whatever it wants once it gets the money from the county commission, unless the commission uses the current law to restrict it. The Beaufort County Commission does not exercise the authority they have now, so why would anyone assume they would under S 236?

    The answer to that lies in how the school board functions. And our school board does not have a very good track record on that point when it comes to facilities planning. There are more than a dozen articles in our archives that document them wasting over $20 million since the bond issue passed. Recent expert studies have documented that they built too many classrooms where there were not, or ever will be, enough students to fill them and left other schools overcrowded. Yet the school board has made no move to develop a plan that would make better use of the existing facilities, yet they just went before the commissioners and ask for more money to renovate a building that they several times said was obsolete. They spent forty million dollars without a long range facilities plan based on solid data. And of course, they lied about their needs in a lawsuit against the county taxpayers. That's not a very good record to support the argument that the school board should control the facilities money.

    But, in fairness to the school board, it should be said that there is new leadership on the board and there is a new superintendent since all the problems outlined above occurred.

    But the question remains: Is this school board going to do any better job of managing facilities than the previous one did? Several members who were on that previous board are still there. And there has been no obvious movement to develop a long range facility plan based on the data that has been assembled by the new superintendent. The jury is still out on that, no pun intended.

    So if S 236 passes and that provides a mechanism that the county commission can prevent what happened by the previous school board, we think that is a good thing.

    What is needed is for the school board to get its act together and present a sound data-driven long range facilities plan to the county commission and public that will make the most efficient, practical use of the existing facilities and a long range maintenance plan that will take care of the facilities we now have.

    Those plans should then be negotiated between the two boards. And then the commissioners should find the money that is needed to fund the plans. But the school board should carry out the plan according to the mutual agreement between the two boards. S 236 provides a mechanism for doing just that.

    But the emotional arguments need to stop. The school board is sounding like they are simply power hungry. The county commissioners pushing S 236 are also coming across as playing a power game. But what is needed most of all is a rational, systematic approach to facilities planning. Neither board has a stellar record of that at this point. Maybe, just maybe, S 236 will help force both of them to do a better job.

    Click here to read S.236.