There are a whole lot of legitimate criticisms that can be made against the Guilford County Board of Commissioners; however, one of those criticisms is not that the board’s lack of funding for the schools has caused the recent repeated problems with the HVAC system at Page High School – which has led to several days of lost learning for the students.
Page High, in what has been a highly publicized controversy, has been closed multiple days in January due to heating problems – and the school would have lost more days had the snow and ice not later halted the entire school system.
On some days when the rest of the school system has been open, Page has been holding virtual learning; however, parents of students say that, in most cases, online classes are a sad substitute for actual classroom learning.
Understandably, a lot of parents of Page students complained to the Guilford County Board of Education and to other school officials – and, amazingly, some school leaders pointed fingers at the Guilford County Board of Commissioners.
In essence, the charge was that the commissioners weren’t properly funding the schools.
The reason that it is absurd to think that the commissioners and Guilford County staff are the culprits is that, for the last four years, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners has showered money on the schools for construction and repair projects – as well as for the schools’ operational needs. The Board of Commissioners has allowed $2 billion in school bonds on the ballot, helped pass those bond referendums, and, even before the commissioners raised one dime from the first bond sale, the county opened up a line of credit based on those coming revenues so the schools could go ahead and start spending it on needed projects before the money came in.
No Guilford County Board of Commissioners in history has ever been remotely near as generous to the school system as the current board has; and, whatever the true problem is with the heating and air repairs at Page, it is absolutely in no way, shape or form, the fault of Guilford County staff or the Board of Commissioners.
The county raises the money and hands it to the schools – as the county has already done with hundreds of millions of dollars – and then the school system – ultimately the Guilford County Board of Education – decides how that money is spent and which schools and projects get the most monetary love.
Guilford County Commissioners were obviously – and justifiably – dismayed recently when some Guilford County Schools officials pointed the finger at the commissioners at a school board meeting for the problems with heating and air at Page. They also encouraged those who were upset to go to the Guilford County Board of Commissioners meeting, which a large group of them did on Thursday, Jan. 9, the last meeting of the Board of Commissioners.
At the Board of Education meeting, School Board Member David Coates said: “I hope that the Page people show up at the county meetings and let them know what’s going on. I’d like to say the buck stops here, but it doesn’t entirely.”
School Board Member T. Dianne Bellamy Small said, “I hope staff will work with us, based on what Mr. Coates just said, to jointly advocate to our county commissioners to get off the money. And now is the time to start annoying them to the point that, hopefully, when we get to budget time, our superintendent will not have to sit there and have them tell her that there is no money – because that’s a lie.”
Yes, there is money – lots and lots of it – and that money has been flowing into the schools from the commissioners for years and it will continue to do so at a very rapid pace. For the last half decade, county officials have worked very closely with school officials on the schedule for issuing and raising bond money based on school construction and repair plans and needs.
As Guilford County Chairman of the Board Alston pointed out to Page advocates who spoke on the matter and those who came to show support for the speakers, the county raises the money but the school board sets the priorities for how that money is spent.
The Board of Commissioners, at their Thursday, Jan. 9 meeting – understandably devoted a portion of their meeting to essentially respond to the accusation that the county was in any way at fault for the HVAC situation at Page.
Guilford County Manager Mike Halford said, upon being questioned, “So the short answer is the Board of Education has a responsibility to prioritize that order and prioritize the needs. The responsibility of the Board of Commissioners is to work along with that prioritization, keeping into an account your trustee responsibility to the community of fiscal stewardship.”
Halford added that the county’s responsibility was to have a finance plan that addresses the priorities as established by the Board of Education.
“And that’s what’s been going on, really over the last six to seven years between the two bodies: Here are the needs; here is the Board of Education’s prioritization of those needs; because you all don’t do that – that’s with that board.”
At the January 9 commissioners meeting, Halford explained that the county can’t go out on the bond market and just issue $2 billion in bonds all at once.
He said it wasn’t possible because the Local Government Commission – a State of North Carolina financial oversight board – would never allow it; nor would, he said, the credit rating agencies. That’s because, Halford added, “that would severely damage the financial position of the county and the budget, and remove our ability to do all of those other things you are mandated to do including operating funding for the school system.”
Chairman Alston said at the meeting, “I guess the short answer is that we’re not responsible for fixing the air conditioning and heating systems in the schools; so we want the general public to know that we’ve been getting emails saying why aren’t we funding these schools in order for them to fix the air conditioning and heating systems and the school – specifically Page today – but that’s not our responsibility. We allocate the funds and then they are responsible for saying which of the projects are fixed and which ones are not, so it’s not the county commissioners that the public needs to be holding accountable, and I just wanted to make sure that that’s understood.”
Something may indeed be rotten in Denmark, however, the Board of Commissioners, in this case, is not Denmark. And the commissioners, at their January 9 meeting, used several convincing means – statements from commissioners, reports from staff, explanations by the county manager – to forcefully convey that message to the public and to the upset Page High School advocates who came to the commissioners meeting that night or who were watching from home.
