We’re often perplexed by the actions and philosophy of the Alamance-Burlington school board.
And no more so than this week, when the board voted to initiate legal action against the county commissioners for not giving them enough money in the 2025-2026 budget.
Why now?
There is inherent tension between the two boards – every year, and on many spending issues, but particularly during budget season when the fiscal year plan is laid out and finalized.
The commissioners, with a narrow 3-2 majority Monday night, voted to give the school system a whopping net increase of $19 million (!) from what was first proposed earlier by county manager Heidi York.
And, in the process, they raised the property tax rate by 2½-cents per $100 valuation.
And yet the very next day, the school board says that’s not enough.
What ingrates.
They want all of the more than 32.5 percent increase in spending that they submitted.
Who asks for that kind of increase in one year? (Only the school system, which appears to be more and more radicalized in its mindset.)
This is the first time that the school system has resorted to the dramatic action of, quite literally, threatening to take the county to court (first through mediation) – and we’re not at all sure but that they’ll come to regret it.
First and foremost, being on good terms with the people who control the purse strings is usually a high priority for most governmental agencies.
Second, the county commissioners just gave the school system the most money they’ve ever gotten from the county: $66.1 million for operations and its capital needs, an $8 million increase in one fiscal year!
But school officials apparently think they’re entitled to another $12.4 million.
And, just by the way, we’ve noticed that in all of the belly-aching about school funding, absolutely no one among the school system’s dozens of advocates (including school system officials, speakers and sign- and banner-holders) has said anything about performance.
This is clearly because, ironically, the more spending has increased for the school system, the lower the test scores seem to descend.
We don’t know that there’s any causation to this correlation in the negative direction, but there certainly hasn’t been a positive trend in student proficiency – even when it has been coupled with ever-greater spending allocations.
The county has consistently given the lion’s share of the county budget to the school system.
The county has consistently paid over 90 percent of the school system’s budget request every year, up to and including the current fiscal year that ends June 30 [see accompanying chart on page 4] – no matter how far-fetched some of those spending ideas are, including this year’s $1.1 million request to start a whole new supplement program for so-called classified employees, such cafeteria workers and bus drivers.
This is the local equivalent of a new “entitlement,” which will grow by tens of thousands of dollars each year.
Elsewhere on these opinion pages we speculate that voters may be interested in changing some of the faces representing them on the board of commissioners.
Even more so, after this week, they should follow suit with the school board.
