Jul 21 2008
Greenville County Taxpayers Association Says School District Overspends
In reacting to news that the Greenville County School District may have won its court battle to levy six more mills next year, Butch Taylor, president of the Greenville County Taxpayers Association, this morning attacked the district’s spending program
“They have an enormous appetite for spending money,” Taylor said. “They’ve got a steak taste on a hamburger budget sometimes, and they’ve just got to eat hamburger sometimes like the rest of us do. Sometimes it’s not even that, it’s bologna, if we’re lucky.”
School board chairman Dr. Keith Ray and a school district attorney said last week that Greenville County Circuit Court Judge John Few announced his intention “to rule in favor of the state cap being applied to the district and not the local cap.”
The broader state cap, which allows tax increases based on population growth and inflation should be used, which would allow a six-mill increase this year for a budget of $451.5 million, Ray said.
School districts across the country waste exhorbitant amounts of money on ineffective administrative positions and top of the line athletic facilities that sometimes rival a university, just to give a few examples. It doesn’t take a whole of money to hire quality educators who can teach children reading, writing, and arithmetic. School boards throw more and more money at public schools every year and they turn out a mediocre product at best. Walk into any university and ask yourself why all the medical and science students are foreigners. The answer is simple. Young American adults are too stupid to enter those fields because they were not properly educated in the government schools.
Getting to Greenville County Schools in particular, while I agree with Taylor’s assessment at the macro level, Greenville actually ranks 75th out of the 85 school districts in South Carolina in terms of per pupil spending, so they are one of the most money conscious in the state. Now that doesn’t mean they still don’t waste money and could afford to trim back a little. The property tax increase they are asking for is rather substantial and I am willing to bet they could trim the fat a bit if they really made the effort. This is a problem experienced with any bureaucracy and it exists due to the ignorance of the voters.
According to the South Carolina Department of Education, Greenville County Schools spent $7,163 per student in the 2006 fiscal year. That’s more on par with our European counterparts, but even though Greenville has a reputation for being one of the better school districts in the state in terms of academic achievement, I would still bet on the Belgian kid to beat the pants out Greenville’s students in an academic decathlon.
