Wednesday,September 10, 2003

School shortfall result of bad planning by BOE

Our Georgia law requires the school board to publish a notice of property tax increase and to hold hearings for concerned citizens. Usually the most obscure and least read newspaper in the county is selected to publicize these hearings. The minimum number of officials show up for the meeting, where they are prepared to sit, stone-faced and dummy-like, to hear, but without really listening, any citizen foolish enough to think his opinion could make any difference.

This year our school board will hold these useless ceremonies at noon and 6 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 11, and at 8 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 18, before it officially rubber-stamps what it claims is a 12.29 percent increase in the tax for school maintenance and operations.

The school board is levying a little under $70 million, or roughly $700 per resident, in property tax this year, plus an extra $14 million ($140 per resident) for school bonds.

As I have explained before, the 2000 school system leadership arranged for the 2001 school bonds to be repayable over nine years. If these school bonds had been made repayable over 24 years, instead, that would have cut the annual repayment in half and our Fayette citizens would have only $7 million to pay in school bonds this year.

Thus for the same overall 2003 tax outlay by our citizens, there would be an extra $7 million available for the 2003-04 students in our schools today. That would have made it unnecessary to curtail school bus service as drastically as the board did.

Every time school officials make bad decisions, the people who suffer most are the students, because the educational opportunities of which they are deprived can almost never come back.

Our school officials may have much to be proud of, but financial management must be identified as a major weakness. It will stay that way until the board finally opens its eyes and reaches outside its close group of current advisers for better ideas on how to do more with less.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayetteville, Ga.
cypaquin@msn.com