The puzzlement is puzzling.
Some Hamilton County Schools officials can’t fathom why the County Commission wants to make sure that millions of dollars in revenue are spent on school construction – rather than swallowed up in the schools’ general purpose budget.
But it isn’t as if the school board and administration have given the commission no reason to question their stewardship. All too often when the board spends according to its own priorities, it looks like that scene from “The Little Rascals” where Grandma leaves the kids in charge of the candy counter. They frivolously divvy up the sweets, then Wheezer cries, “T’ain’t enough!”
A school board that handles money half as wisely as it thinks it does wouldn’t, for instance, have lavished retirement benefits on itself for part-time work. Sure hope the members who voted for those benefits think it was worth it, now that the commission is putting a bit of school funding on restriction.
Weirder still, the board and administration have revived talk of providing across-the-board $400 or $500 bonuses to school district employees. That multimillion-dollar boondoggle could wind up costing jobs.