Recently, the Cobb County Board of Education voted unanimously to purchase property along Terrell Mill Road for the relocation of Brumby Elementary school. The $9.4 million price tag is being paid for with tax dollars raised from a Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax.
Bear with me as we look at some quick math. The required acreage to house an elementary school for 1000 children is 15 acres (Brumby now enrolls 1,020 students). Yet, the Cobb school board has agreed to buy 35 acres at a cost of roughly $269,000 per acre.
At that price, if Cobb only bought the 15 acres necessary to hold an elementary school, we’d pay $4 million. So, why has the school board agreed to buy 20 extra acres at an additional cost of $5.4 million?
Cobb schools are facing an $80 million budget deficit for the 2014 fiscal year. We have buses that break down, leaving 5-year-olds standing on the side of the road. We have students attending classes in trailers without bathrooms. We have teacher furloughs.
Any extra money is better spent improving conditions at our existing schools, not buying surplus land for which there are no plans, at least as far as taxpayers know. (The school board has denied there’s a plan to build a middle school on the site.)
It seems to me a more common-sense and certainly more fiscally responsible approach is to purchase the amount of land actually needed to rebuild the school. When questioned at a recent meeting, Cobb school board member Scott Sweeney said the district only had the option to buy the entire 35 acres on Terrell Mill. He said there are few other options of open land left in Cobb.
Local officials just found 60 acres to build a new baseball stadium for the Braves; surely they can find 15 acres to build an elementary school. When asked where else they looked, Sweeney confirmed the school board considered other sites, but would not reveal what they are.
When I attended the school board meeting last week to raise my concerns, I was struck by the difference in the way board members talk about their operating budget — the one that’s $80 million in the red — compared to how they view SPLOST money. While board members asked numerous questions about a few thousand dollars in project overages in the operating budget, no one questioned the wisdom of spending millions in SPLOST funds on land for which they have no plan.
As the mother of a child who has been out of school for seven furlough days this year, I can think of another way to spend an extra $5.4 million. Let’s stop sending our teachers home on unpaid leave and actually pay them for the excellent work they do. After all, what has a greater impact on your child’s ability to learn — a qualified teacher, or more ball fields?
We have a right to know how our education tax dollars are being spent. Unfortunately, I’m having a hard time believing the school board is putting the best interests of our children first.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely as he spends his own.” If it was your checkbook, would you spend twice as much as necessary? Well, it’s our collective checkbook, and the school board has the pen.
