I realize I was hard on the Guilford County Board of Education in the previous post, but I’m biased. So in the interest of being fair and balanced, I’ll note Paul Clark’s unbiased Rhino account of the board’s ‘game of chicken’ with county commissioners:
….Commissioners tried to hammer the school board members into recognizing that yes, we’re in a brutal recession, and everyone has to share the pain, and the school board members used every trick in the book to avoid making decisions on stopping funding for particular school construction projects – decisions that would make them targets for voters in parts of the county who are determined to have construction continue on the schools they were promised.
School board Chairman Alan Duncan said the school board members had been working on prioritizing school construction projects at its own Jan. 25 retreat. He said, “We’ve done a lot of groundwork on that.”
At the school board retreat, however, the school board did no such thing. It put off any prioritization of projects to try to force the commissioners to make the decision.
I realize the gist of today’s editorial is economic development depends on good schools. But it also says the collective “we” are in this together, yet the school board is looking out only for itself. They’ll tell you it’s for the children, but bringing our country back from the brink of insolvency is for the children, too.
