1/19/07
Pressure is building
A nice editorial by Francis DeLuca in today's N&O, and for a change the N&O did not counter with its own contradictory piece. While I was not able to post here the school board's CIP budget spreadsheets which were questioned by Commissioner Gardner, my wife and I did take some time to go through them last night. A first set of spreadsheets were in Mr. Gardner's meeting materials packet which he received prior to sitting down with the school board. The board handed out a second set of spreadsheets at the meeting, which did not match the first. Some budget line-items increased, others decreased. Closer to home, one anomoly we noticed was that both budget documents featured a line-item for MYR conversion of elementary schools ($12M), as well as a line-item for conversion Wendell and East Cary middle schools. Neither document called out Salem Middle for conversion, but that's what the board announced. We are trusting the 9 people on the school board to responsibly manage over $1 billion of our money. In the corporate sector, shareholders of a $1B company would be appalled by mis-matched budget documents, petty territorialism by management and discovery of hidden 'contingency' funds. As shareholders of Wake County we should be equally appalled.
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2 comments:
I bet Salem Middle wasn't on anyones minds because there isn't a capacity issue at this school. Remember, Patti Head's was the vote that made SMS get converted (5-4 vote).
There appears to be many schools that are on the targeted MYR conversion that have no capacity issue problems.
It also appears as if they are just shuffling 18k students for some unknown reason to the majority of us or are playing the socio-eng game to meet the high profile discrepenices in next years test results.
If they were to be really truthful, then with each reasignment they should be telling those nodes when and where the next move will be..after all is that not what all the planning has been doing and showing?
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