Beating the Dead School Horse | Eastern North Carolina Now

Beating the Dead School Horse

BY: HOOD RICHARDSON

The controversy of closing Snowden School seems like the issue will go on forever.  This is because I and the concerned public have been saying, shouting and now screaming about the same four falsified issues over and over without any acknowledgement from the powers who have connived to close the school.

Those issues are: money saved, travel times for students, damage to the community and ethics.  Closing Snowden will come to a head this coming Tuesday night, June 3 at 5:30 PM, at the School Board meeting located at 845 North Pierce Street in Washington.  A vote is scheduled.

The representation that the School System will save 1.76 million dollars is false.  This is not a matter of opinion, that amount of savings is false.  The amount of 1.76 million dollars is the total cost of operating the S. W. Snowden school for one year.  That is the cost of teachers, electricity, water, insurance, sewer, supplies, etc., etc.  According to information provided by the school system, 1.44 million of that is the cost of teachers.  Teachers are paid by the State of North Carolina, not Beaufort County.  That 1.44-million-dollar expense will continue whether or not Snowden is closed.  Therefore, the maximum amount to be saved is $320,000.00.  Most of this cost is for supplies and electricity which will be there wherever the student is located.  Therefore, the savings in expense may be one hundred thousand dollars.

The report prepared by the Big Cheese to close Snowden does not address the increased cost of buying buses and paying for drivers, insurance and fuel to haul these students to Chocowinity.  The report skirts around additional costs for school buildings at Chocowinity by implying that there is adequate space available.  Simply because the report does not make an unqualified statement means all of the space is not available.

The report fraudulently presents travel times by addressing travel times inside the existing school district.  It never addresses the additional travel time for the 25 miles from Aurora to Chocowinity.  This goes to the welfare of those students who may spend as much as four hours per day on the bus.  The welfare of the student is one of the things the General Statute says must be addressed in closing a school.

The report prepared by the Big Cheese to justify the closing of the S. W. Snowden school fails in all respects.

Great damage will be done to the Aurora community in closing Snowden because the entire southeast corner of Beaufort County will become very unattractive to residential development and therefore to business.  The success of small communities comes and goes. Closing Snowden is a negative for the long-term future of Aurora.

There are serious ethics (honesty) questions about the two husbands who serve on the Board of Commissioners with their two wives serving on the School Board.  They vote in lockstep with each other.  Another ethical issue is the two Republicans who formed an alliance with the two Democrats and vote as a block.  All of these people are in this tight knit cell that vote identically with each other.  These players are: Randy and Carolyn Walker, Ed and Eltha Booth, Jerry Langley and Fake Frankie Waters.

It looks like the person who is striving for the closing of Snowden is the School Superintendent, the Big Cheese.  Modern schoolhouse liberals want to consolidate schools under the false flag of saving money.  Their real motive is to get these young minds into one large building away from parents so they can be taught modern liberal thinking.  This includes DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), CRT (critical race theory), modern illogical math, and social studies without history or the Constitution.  They do not like textbooks either.

Closing Snowden will allow the Big Cheese to eliminate his lowest performing school. Questions presented to the School Board at the May 5 Commissioners’ meeting indicate that neither the School Board nor the Superintendent have put any effort into saving Snowden. The lack of initiative by the School Board shows a strong degree of apathy.

The Big Cheese is telling School Board members that keeping Snowden open could cost them teachers.  This is a big farce.  The State Department of Public Instruction assigns teachers to the schools by the number of students in the school.  The teachers go with the students.  The Big Cheese may be able to wangle one teacher in each school.  However, a complaint to the Department of Public Instruction in Raleigh will put things right.

Show up Tuesday night to support neighborhood schools and fight the evils of consolidation.