How many meetings, seminars and workshops are needed to adopt a school board budget? Apparently, the St. Mary Parish School Board needs more this year than any in recent history.
In what only can be described thus far as a fiasco, the school board is still without an approved spending plan after three attempts to adopt one.
Board members met twice during the week of July 13 in an attempt to devise a spending plan, having referred the matter to a special Ad Hoc Committee.
A seven-hour committee meeting produced several minor recommendations that were incorporated into a proposed budget by Chief Financial Officer Alton Perry and his staff.
That proposed, highly scrutinized spending plan then was presented last week at a special board meeting in what was expected to be — and what should have been — a rather routine adoption.
For whatever reason, however, several board members insisted on having various line items substantially reduced or deleted — line items that have been a part of the public school’s budget for years and have ample justification for being there. It took another three hours to hack through the line-item questions.
In the process some board members suggested that Perry make the necessary adjustments to reflect those changes by next month. But, Perry already had scheduled vacation time, so the task is not expected to be completed until Sept. 10, literally days before the 2009-2010 budget goes into effect.
That’s not good business.
Last week’s special board meeting — by then ringing up a total of 10 hours of budget discussion — inexplicably produced dozens of votes on items that should have been settled during prior meetings or during personal phone calls to Perry requesting background information.
What resulted was politically uncomfortable split votes on virtually every motion. Lengthy discussion ensued about how various accounts historically have been funded.
There was even a debate on basic budget philosophy, forcing Perry to explain his self-professed conservative approach to the entire process. Suddenly, we’re back to square one.
One might conjure that the board has turned ultra-conservative. But explanations from Perry that what they were slicing and dicing was indeed a conservative budget apparently has fallen on deaf ears. Attempts to explain that a budget, especially in its infancy each year, is at best only a set of goals based on the best educated guess a staff can muster, also apparently have escaped board comprehension.
For the record, the public school board budget now under consideration may be described at best as “standstill.” For the record, we are not and have never discouraged elected official or public input. For the record, open dialogue is key to responsible government.
However, single questions about a single line item in an $80 million school board budget generally should not be for public consumption. The public, after all, elected school board members to represent their interests and bestowed upon those public figures a trust that must be administered responsibly.
And for the record, the conservative approach Perry deploys is one we fully support.
If there suddenly are so many questions about how the school system’s budget is prepared, it is time to let everyone in on why those questions are being asked. The public needs to know the reason for this sudden cause for concern.
We have seen no indication of discrepancies, nor has the board’s annual independent audit provided any such cause for concern.
So, we are left with board members’ apparent attempts to micromanage a budget they are not responsible for building. This hasn’t been a productive exercise. In fact, the board is causing the public to wonder if it knows what it is doing with respect to this very basic, annual exercise called budgeting.
More crucial is the apparent unexplainable erosion of the trust relationship between the administration and the school board members, who are suddenly and repeatedly intent on picking apart the budget, line by line.
That trust relationship is all we are left to question as we ponder this school board budget mystery.