Bonds A Bad Bet For Suburbia
By BRIAN GOTT - STAFF WRITER
If voters approve a school bond package at the polls this November, it won’t matter what the total bond is; suburban residents of the county will likely be the ones who end up the big losers, according to some county commissioners and school board members.
That’s because Democrats currently hold majority control of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, and Democrats on both elected bodies said they favor filling empty seats in inner city schools ahead of building new seats in suburban schools.
For example, Commissioner Valerie Woodard, a Democrat, said she would only vote for a bond package that guarantees filling inner-city schools ahead of building new schools in high growth areas. Similarly, Commissioner Norman Mitchell, a Democrat, has often used suburban school overcrowding hostage as a means toward an end of filling inner-city school seats.
“I think some of the children in those areas can come to some of the schools in the inner city,� Woodard said. She also said it was “hog wash� that crowded schoolroom conditions hamper learning.
“I think you can have rooms at full capacity and children can still learn,� Woodard said.
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Several school board members, like Vilma Leake, routinely make it a point to comment that the district needs to move students from overcrowded, suburban schools to fill empty seats in inner city schools, instead of building new schools in the suburbs. Others contend that the school system has for years been using brick-and-mortar misprioritization to supplant forced busing to accomplish the same end.
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The Republicans – commissioners Jim Puckett, Dan Bishop and Bill James and school board members Larry Gauvreau and Kaye McGarry, want the COPs to be spent only on “new seats,� or the areas in the county with the highest growth and the most overcrowded schools. Of course, that might not matter with a board of commissioners controlled by a tax-and-spend majority bent on spending money on under-capacity schools.
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McGarry said the core problem is that Democrats on both the school board and board of commissioners are not being fiscally responsible, something that voters need to be made aware of. In turn, she said, voters need to lobby their elected officals to spend any bond or COPs money in a fiscally realistic manner that puts priorities over partisanship and political pandering.
“We have a very liberal board of commissioners,� McGarry said. “I just think they don’t have any real sense of fiscal accountability to the taxpayers.
“Our most critical need is the new [school] construction,� she said. “I think they are bypassing the real issue. Everybody’s little pet project is in there and that’s not showing fiscal accountability.�
Gauvreau, who represents the northern end of the county where suburban schools are routinely overpacked and littered with trailers, said he agreed that any bond package that fails to prioritize spending in the areas where it’s needed the most to alleviate severe overcrowding would be a loss for the community.
“The powers of Charlotte are always going to try to cut off suburban areas first,� Gauvreau said. “It’s institutional liberalism at work. The priority isn’t the suburban students. It’s wrong, but that’s the way they think.�
Rhino Times Article