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‘SPLOST for kids’ is false premise A select group of inhabitants are putting the school SPLOST in the spin cycle. Like when you dare to find fault with the shady TDK Extension road project, they say you do not care about relieving traffic, so too goes the SPLOST. So now we have people saying, if you question the fiscal accountability and decision-making of the Fayette County Board of Education (FCBOE), you must want our children to fail. One of these days, the general public is going to stop believing the spin of the questionable few and will join in a judicious debate regarding fiscal stewardship and reliability. It was a disgrace for someone to attempt to discredit Claude Paquin’s factual assessment of the FCBOE’s fiscal strategies because of his age. Truth be told, Mr. Paquin had nothing to do with his age. And lest we forget, Mr. Paquin has paid school taxes in Fayette for around a quarter of a century without ever having a child in the school system. Instead of the spin of attacking Mr. Paquin to avoid discussing his positions, why not write him a thank you letter for paying your children’s way through school? In the name of full disclosure, I wholeheartedly supported the 2000 bond referendum. At the time, the principle was to build infrastructure to meet the legitimate student demand. My words of support appear in the archives of this newspaper. Unfortunately, I mistakenly thought the same approach was being used with the 2004 bond referendum and, admittedly, I did not even bother to check things out. Things changed and the new rule behind the 2004 bonds was build it and they will come. The school system, instead of keeping pace with student population growth, is now promoting growth with excess capacity in undeveloped areas. The new schools are actually encouraging residential growth around them. The deception with the sales pitch from the 2004 bonds was the fact the elementary school population was actually in decline and the FCBOE never mentioned the closing of East Fayette Elementary School – a school which received expensive renovations from our 2000 bond funds — in any of their documents. Another ploy was the creation of the “External Construction Advisory Committee” which was promoted as an outside advisory group. On the face of it, accountability appears to be the motive. However, the disturbing truth is the committee simply parroted everything the “Internal Construction Committee,” comprised of senior FCBOE staffers, had to say on the construction of the two new elementary schools. In fact, I found memos from both committees that were identical to the word. The indistinguishable documents in support of building the two new schools from the committees, dated August 2007, twice stated the need for “additional classroom space” when all the data clearly pointed to a decline in the elementary population. The matching committee documents also supported the building of the schools because of the cost of operation and safety issues related to using portable classrooms, when the truth is we have excess capacity inside the elementary school network, so trailers are not needed. Let’s put this in perspective. Two FCBOE committees came to the identical conclusion (verbatim) in August 2007 that housing growth was driving the need to build the two new elementary schools with the 2004 bonds, when the very next month the AJC ran an article entitled, “Schools get fewer pupils than planned” and while the U.S. Census data and government records showed Fayette County growth at a standstill. Anyone who tells you the excess classroom capacity produced from the current 2004 bonds was not predictable is lying. Regrettably, a “crowding” illusion was created when certain schools became artificially crowded via a damaging FCBOE policy which allowed FCBOE employees to enroll their children (around 300 students) out of district in schools close to maximum capacity. More regrettably, the FCBOE is building the two new schools smaller than their standard to make up for not having the students to fill them. This will lead to an obvious need for an expensive expansion for the schools when the county’s population grows years down the road. One of the problems cited by the FCBOE regarding why they need to spend the bond funds on the two new elementary schools was they may miss the deadline for expending the funds, and would have to credit those funds back to the taxpayers. That refund of our taxes could help taxpayers pay the recent millage increase the FCBOE approved on our homes and property. You will also find a move to make excess school capacity appear smaller than reality. The FCBOE was able to camouflage their over-capacity problem by creating a lower maximum student capacity number for each of the schools. It is comparable to saying an egg carton with six eggs in a dozen slots is 50 percent full. But they took a marker and changed the word “dozen” to “eight” and now claim the same carton is 75 percent full. Next, they tell you we need to buy a new carton because the other one is very near the new maximum capacity number. To exacerbate this problem, the state funds we receive are based upon the state’s higher capacity number for our core facilities. Thus, we lose funding because of the lower enrollment to capacity ratio. In 2006, two full years ago, the FCBOE had around 106 elementary classrooms in excess of the state guidelines. (In fairness, the state does not fund special education instructional units, so they should be extracted.) The current state capacity numbers for our schools include the new lower state ratios and federal No Child Left Behind standards. FCBOE’s numbers are still 82.5 percent of the state’s numbers. FCBOE is masking an over-capacity problem because they have two new empty schools. According to FCBOE documents, student enrollment growth projections have been stagnating. Thus, the excess classrooms from the new schools will create a greater erosion of state funding and much embarrassment for the school board members. So to ease that pain, their solution was to close East Fayette Elementary to dispose of some viable excess capacity. Even if you split the difference between the state’s capacity numbers and the FCBOE’s numbers, there will still be around three empty schools worth of capacity. Board Member Janet Smola had a very misleading email distributed to local homeowners. In the correspondence she blamed the “elderly” for the failure of two previous SPLOST attempts. However, you can see she vastly overreached, statistically, when you review the final vote tallies on the two referendums. In reality, the two previous SPLOSTs failed because they were contrived in much the same way her current SPLOST proposal is by asking for an aquatics center as a “cannot wait any longer” item in midst of an uncertain economy. (When faced with opposition, the FCBOE removed the aquatics center, but they kept $115 million SPLOST price tag; it was never reduced.) Ms. Smola wrote about needed “computers and technology software, [and] bandwidth for technology,” but what she neglects to say is she promised to buy the technology package with the 2004 bond funds and did not do it. The code phrase “diversity of revenue sources” is being used a lot with the SPLOST. Accordingly, Ms. Smola said, “It’s important to note that almost $40 million of the SPLOST funding is set aside for debt reduction that will translate to a reduction in the millage rate passed on to property owners.” The irony of her statement is she plans to get additional taxes (sales taxes) out of us to pay off the debt she is currently taxing us for annually. Furthermore, the added “diversity” is really Ms. Smola forcing our senior citizens to pay off bond debt that the law exempts them from paying. I find that to be sneaky, abusive and immoral. Ms. Smola, coincidentally, forgot to tell the homeowners about the un-diverse part of the SPLOST. Local businesses do not pay into the SPLOST; rather, they pass the regressive tax onto us, the consumers, when we buy the necessities of life. This is why the sly Fayette County Chamber of Commerce leaps to aid the passage of any SPLOST because they receive all the benefits, but do not pay for them. Ms. Smola stated, “... your property taxes will go down,” but she does not say how. She promised teachers a pay raise with funds she does not have and she has not met the minimum reserve fund balance in years, and taxes are supposed to be going down? This is the same promise Mayor Logsdon made in Peachtree City with taxes and fees rising every year since. Ms. Smola tried to create voter fear in favor of the SPLOST by saying, “... with recent and potential foreclosures there could be millions of dollars in uncollected property taxes.” Oh, please, the banks pay the property taxes on foreclosures. Ms. Smola also forgot to tell the homeowners she could have re-purposed the 2004 bond funds to meet the immediate technology and other needs for which she wants a SPLOST, but she decided to build excess school capacity with a declining student population instead. Following the Fayette Chamber of Commerce forum (they do not pay the SPLOST taxes, but we citizens do) on education funding, I will provide you with evidence on how the bonds went wrong, key decisions went awry and identify those who are benefiting from all of this. login to post comments | Steve Brown's blog
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