The lunacy of voting for cross-town busing--Revised and updated | Eastern North Carolina Now

The Lunacy of Voting for Cross-town Busing

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the “Lunacy at the School Board” regarding their proposal to tear down the John Cotton Tayloe and the Eastern Elementary School buildings and replace them with an approximately 1,000 student school building to house kindergarten thru the third-grade students. The plan is to get a 42-million-dollar grant from the Lottery and for Beaufort County taxpayers to pony up ten million dollars in matching funds.

For those who want their news in small bites, what I am reporting is that the majority on this school board and county commission propose to spend 50 million dollars with little or no comprehensive planning and without looking at all of the needs in the county.  This decision will result in continuation of the crazy chopped up grade patterns and continue a horribly inefficient student busing system of cross town busing.   The decision was made with NO public input and with less than an hour of public discussion by both boards combined.  In short, it is hard to imagine a worse decision-making process than they used here.

Don’t forget, when the decision in the last bond issue was made to build two new schools on Market Street, Chocowinity, the only schools with growth trends, was promised new classrooms.

Don’t forget also that no study has been given to going to neighborhood schools to reduce busing and allow for continuity that a K-8 system would provide. This decision will lock the Washington Attendance Area into a grossly inefficient crosstown busing system for years to come. When they vote for this school, they are voting for cross-town busing of our youngest children when they could have gone towards neighborhood schools. This is s “Bussing Decision” for years to come.

This decision will make nothing better in addressing the problem of declining enrollment, but will in fact exacerbate it.  It fails to look at the potential for reversal of, or mitigating, enrollment decline that the proposed interstate corridor between Greenville and U S 17 into Beaufort County holds.  In that sense this proposal is the worst possible option for drawing students from Pitt into Beaufort.  Not only would an attractive school in the growth area help Beaufort's declining enrollment ($$$) but it would also attract badly needed residential development if planned well.  Rather, what it proposes is to put a new school in an area of declining enrollment and blocks out an effective K-8 grade structure.  It will not attract much needed residential growth.

Moreover, we have been given no engineering data on the site at Eastern. For heaven's sake people, they are planning to build a 50-75 year school in a ravine!  The drainage problems could be significant, but we have no preliminary planning to adequately assess the site.  We already know the site is a traffic hazard.  Go by that school before the school day and you see the traffic problems that now exist.  Those problems will be increased with a larger school population.  The site may be more suitable for a smaller school, but it is obviously not suitable for the current population, much less for a significantly larger population.

It would be difficult to find a worse planning model than this.  There is no engineering or architectural assessment of the site much less the data to compare new to renovation costs of these things they just pull out of the air as justifications.  There has been no discussion of the educational impact that the chopped-up grade structure, as opposed to a K-8 system.   And it is obvious that the demographic data on student population shifts have not been considered.  

This decision will lock in the cross-town busing of our youngest children for fifty years or more to come.

Above all, we have no student location data to support this decision. It is quite possible that within the life of this facility we will be looking at excess K-8 capacity in the Washington Attendance Area and a continuation of the very inefficient cross-town busing that was supposed to be “temporary.” Before we spend 42 million dollars, we need long-range facilities plan that looks at all of the feasible alternatives, including going to a K-8 system, and compares the needs of other schools in a comprehensive plan to use this lottery money.

This decision obliterates one of the prime reasons for merging the two school systems. 

This decision forecloses the benefit of an interstate highway connector and locating a facility to draw students from Pitt County, to mitigate the problems of cross-town busing and declining enrollments.  See the map link below.  It ignores the fact that the County already owns a large unused site in the Chocowinity area with water and sewer, and is the only area in the county with anticipated growth without the proposed interstate.

The lunacy has spread to five of the seven Beaufort County Commissioners. A full ten minutes was allocated for debate to authorize the School Board to proceed with what turns out to be “no plan.” This is a “no plan” event because “no plan” was presented. No details were presented, and no presentation was made or allowed as to the benefits or disadvantages of spending the 52 million dollars at this site compared to other possibilities, such as using land currently owned in Chocowinity for a new school.  

This decision was made with NO legitimate facilities planning.  There was no consideration given to what other alternatives exist, or could be made to exist.  It is, in short, the worst possible school facilities planning I have ever seen, with perhaps the horrendous planning that went into putting two oversized schools side by side on Market Street, smack in the middle of an area of declining enrollment.

There was a fierce and heated discussion when I started asking questions. The Superintendent came prepared with no answers, no numbers, no statement of advantage in doing the project other than we could get 42 million dollars free if we pony up ten million.  He offered no other options for comparison.  Stan Deatherage and I got hostile rebukes when we tried to ask questions. We took more than ten minutes, but the entire time was spent fending off efforts to stop anything intelligent from happening.

It was obvious the decision had already been made in the back room to proceed with trying to get the 42 million dollars. Staff chimed in and assisted Commissioners Randy Walker, Frankie Waters, Ed Booth, Jerry Langley and John Rebholz in getting the vote across the line. It was five to two with me and Stan Deatherage voting against.
The allocation of only ten minutes, the School Superintendent showing up with no documentation, and the enthusiasm of the staff in supporting the effort was proof the decision had been made in the back room.

Frankie Waters had slides prepared to “puff” his position. The slides were made at County expense and were displayed on the video equipment. No commissioner has ever used county equipment to support his political opinion before (to my knowledge). Fake Frankie Waters insists that all commissioners have the right to use county equipment this way.

Frankie Waters takes great pride in asking all commissioners to divulge whether they have a conflict of interest in anything on the agenda at the beginning of each meeting. It is always unethical and sometimes illegal for a public official to vote on issues that benefit them personally. It is also unethical for public officials to vote to appropriate public funds to promote their personal political opinion on an issue. Fake Frankie Waters does not think so. He sits on the Republican Executive Committee while having made donations to Democrats. There is no evil in Frankie’s world.

There are a multitude of problems that should be addressed before starting a project like this. Among these are sending so many small children to such a large school. We have small children who get on buses around 6:30 AM and get home around 6:30 PM.  With a larger school this situation will get worse.

Over two thirds of Beaufort County Schools are rated at the “D” level on state tests. Does the school system have a plan to improve our ratings? Will the new school contribute to better learning programs and conditions? What are the plans for classroom layout, clustering or parking lot pick up. Most of the schools in Beaufort County are half empty and the County is losing students annually. Why build more schools? What is wrong with the Eastern Elementary to minimum of ten million dollars? Is there money in the 52-million-dollar budget to buy furniture and IT systems for the new school? Every day the buses roll to bus kids across town will cost more. Etc, etc, etc.  This is the worst possible example of good school facilities planning.

What is happening here is a school board and superintendent presenting a proposal to spend fifty million dollars for one site while having no long-range comprehensive plan for the entire county.  It is the worst possible example of facilities planning I have ever seen.

It is obvious that neither the school board nor the county commissioners have spent any time trying to solve any of these problems. Because of the lack of effort by these two bodies of elected officials and their back-room effort to keep the public out of the process, I cannot support the effort until the public is actually
involved. We need the involvement of all to have a good education system. Not just a few big shots.

Based on events and policy decisions made by both the school board and the county commissioners during the past several years I have zero confidence that there will be anything positive come from this reckless effort other than to make the architects and contractors rich and get some people’s names on brass plaque on the school buildings.

Most of the members of the school board and the board of county commissioners have abandoned any responsibility to the public and are allowing unelected bureaucrats to make important decisions for us. This will continue as long as the majority of these boards are not willing to do anything about it.  Some commissioners said the larger schools would make education cheaper. They are not willing to address the quality of education issue. Nor do they have any data to compare the high expense of cross-town busing.

If this grant is made to Beaufort County, only 4 or 5 people will make all the decisions in the back room and then tell the rest of us what to do. They don’t care if they have the word “honorable” in front of their name and they get their pay. Have no doubt. This is a busing decision that will cost us in multiple ways for fifty years or more.

Finally, and what may be most important:  This decision thumbs is nose at the parents and taxpayers.  No real data is offered to support it.  No public participation in the decision was afforded by either the School Board or County Commission.  If you ever wanted an example of how to NOT spend fifty million dollars on a school, you would be hard pressed to find a better example of incompetence by school officials and decision-making by elected officials than this decision represents.

We are now in the election process for the 2024 elections. Voters have an opportunity to roll both boards.

Can you pick the losers on these boards? Vote for change.

We will have more to report on the politics of this decision in a later edition.

DOT_Planning.Map.pdf