Imagine a family that deprives

its oldest child of a college education because Mom and Dad want to accumulate

money to pay cash for the college education of younger children. How sensible

is that?

The fact of the matter is that

the school board has plenty of money. When it submitted its school construction

bond plan in 2000, calling for the repayment of the loan within nine years,

the people of Fayette County demonstrated their generosity by voting for

it, even though I consider such a rapid repayment schedule as borderline

fraud. Claiming poverty because you obligated yourself to pay off in nine

years a mortgage that sensible people would pay off over 30 years is virtually

fraudulent.

What's to be done about this?

It is obvious to me that the board of education needs to get its financial

advice from outside the school system. If it did, it would most likely

get advice that reflects the basic principles of public financing, which

include (1) amortizing capital expenditures over the useful life of the

assets, (2) a long-term school building plan, and (3) a sensible and taxpayer-friendly

borrowing program which forsakes hoarding. (To collect taxes just to build

up reserves simply invites waste. Hoarding is for misers.)

Fayette County citizens want

and deserve a quality education for their children, including appropriate

school bus service. With thoughtfulness it can all be done at a reasonable

cost to the current taxpayers as well as our future generations of taxpayers.

Unless the school board is prepared to surround itself with better advisers,

it will get itself into the same situation it is in now, which no amount

of public relations gimmickry can salvage.

School money wouldn't be tight

right now if it weren't for the dumb decision by the 2000 school board

to pay off the construction of five new schools within nine years. The

result today is needlessly high taxes for repaying the school bonds, which

makes the current board understandably hesitant to hike the tax rate for

normal school operations.

With better advice than it

is now getting internally, the school board could consider developing

a long-term capital financing program which (1) anticipates the construction

of new school buildings as they are needed and (2) restructures the repayments

for the current bond indebtedness, respreading and in the process lowering

the bond repayments and the taxes that go with them.

Intelligent planning is what

good boards do, instead of making low-level decisions like approving student

trips out of the county or the reshuffling of personnel whom they don't

even know. We should demand it of this board and insist they get better

advice.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayetteville, Ga.

[email protected]