Wednesday, September 12, 2001

Please allow me to comment on last week's Citizen front-page article captioned, "What about our gym?" There is a reason why there is no gym, and I'll tell you what it is. I'll also tell you how our kids can get a gym.

Were it not for pressure put on the school superintendent and the school board about this time a year ago, there would have been no bond vote last fall. At the last minute, the superintendent screwed up enough courage to ask the board to authorize a bond vote, and then scrambled to put a project together. The bond vote authorization squeaked by a 3-2 vote, the No votes coming from Connie Hale and Woody Shelnutt, who are no longer school board members.

The school people who ended up making the decisions about the bonds neither like nor understand finance. Perhaps it's just as well, because if they had taken finance as a subject in college they might have ended up working as highly paid investment bankers, and their talents might have been lost to the cause of education.

When these school people put their bond plan together, their lack of understanding about finance and the pressure of time caused them to devise a financing plan which was flawed. They arranged for their bonds to be repaid within nine years, which of course made the payments pretty hefty for those nine years. That also meant they had to hold back on what they would borrow.

Five words can sum up why there's no gym today for Johnny and Jill: "No guts and no brains."

The "no guts" part is easy to understand. The old school board had tried to bribe the parents in every school into voting for SPLOST by promising to spend extra money for every school, and then holding special elections for which it counted on having the non-parents stay home. The smart people of Fayette County, including many parents, didn't fall for that. They showed up and voted No.

There were three possible lessons to be learned from the SPLOST votes. (1) SPLOST is not a good method for financing school buildings and our smart voters refuse to use it. (2) Using costly special elections, when general elections could be used just as well, carries the suggestion that someone is trying to put a fast one over on you. (3) There were too many outlandish projects in the take-it-or-leave-it list proposed to be financed by the extra tax.

All three lessons are reflected in the bond vote we had a year ago: We're finally using bonds, the bond proposal was submitted during a general election where all citizens had a better opportunity to participate, and the projects were limited to the school buildings we allegedly need.

In reference to gyms and auditoriums, school superintendent John DeCotis is quoted in The Citizen (Aug. 5) as saying that "[the voters] felt like those things were not necessary." One must remember that the battle cry when the SPLOST votes were held was about the need for more classrooms, and the shame of having all these trailers (while the school board was hiding all the empty classrooms at Sandy Creek High School, which increased the need for trailers elsewhere, of course).

If the McIntosh students need a gym, if the Sandy Creek students need an auditorium, and if the East Fayette Elementary students need air conditioning for their gym, there is a way to get them what they need.

The first step the brains part is to conduct a serious, competent review of the capital financing methods used by the school system. What the school board has done is primitive and, to put it bluntly, ignorant. It is idiotic to finance schools, which will last 30 years or more, over nine years. Any normal young growing family that would try to finance its home mortgage over nine years is bound to feel a considerable financial crunch, and it will do without a great many conveniences (or even necessities) to humor the parents' obsessive aversion to debt and paying interest.

When people refuse to engage in rational borrowing to meet their immediate needs, the result is simple: they do without. That's why there is no gym, no auditorium, or no air conditioning for Johnny and Jill today.

A study of the school system's capital financing would show that the current bond repayment schedule is irrational and unduly burdensome for the taxpayers. The bond repayments could be rescheduled over a longer period, and that would make them smaller. Then additional bonds could be issued to a level which would make school bond taxes no higher than they are now, and in fact possibly quite a bit lower, and we'd have a gym, an auditorium, or air conditioning for our children. There would not be a big, big drop in school bond taxes in the year 2010 as contemplated now; there would be a smooth tax schedule that makes sense, and current taxes would definitely not go up.

We, the taxpayers, would have to vote on any new bonds, of course. Each project could be the object of a separate vote, instead of their being all lumped together like they were with the SPLOST projects, and bribe projects should be left out. Then we could show Superintendent DeCotis which projects we feel are necessary, and which ones are not.

The suffering which our public school children and parents alike now have to endure is not the result of hard-heartedness on the part of our local taxpayers. The incompetence of our school officials in financial matters is at the root of the problem, and that's compounded by their pride and unwillingness to seek competent help. Just as they were nudged last year into having a bond election that turned out to be a success for our children, they should be nudged again into developing a sound long-term financing plan for school capital needs with the help of people who understand finance beyond the balancing of a checkbook.

We're due to have primary elections next summer. The school bond refinancing plan should be in place by then, and here comes the guts part that's when a vote should be scheduled on a bond plan which gives Johnny and Jill the gym and auditorium they need, without increasing current school bond taxes by a penny. The school board can hem and haw and posture all it wants, or it can go to work and make things happen. It's a matter of whether it's politics they love, or the children.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayetteville

cypaquin@msn.com

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