Why We Need An Online Checkbook

With South Carolina school districts struggling to put gas in their buses and warning of ominous cuts to core educational services, you’d think that the educrats in charge would be doing everything within their power to avoid unnecessary expenses and get as much money as possible into the classroom.

Oh, and you’d think the extra billion dollars in state funding we’ve forked over during the past four years might have helped with that effort, too.

Sadly, you’d be wrong. While the state’s Educrat-in-Chief is bitching and moaning about budget “cuts,” his underlings at the district level are continuing to live high on the hog at the expense of our state’s teachers and students.

From The Voice:

Teresa Pope, superintendent of Barnwell 19, has not restrained her own spending to help the district ride out the financial storm.

In addition to her own salary of $110,000 a year, Pope spent an incredible $10,125 of taxpayer money in traveling expenses in the 2007-2008 school year.

On what, and to where?

That would be an (easy) question to answer if the expenses were clearly documented. Astoundingly, the majority of the thousands of dollars spent by Pope on personal accommodations are totally without description or clarification, and are simply listed as “travel” or- in several cases- just “Visa.”

Incidentally, Pope’s Barnwell 19 district is one of the worst-performing we’ve ever seen. A “shockingly low” 1.7% of its eighth grade students scored proficient in English on recent statewide assessments, while not a single student in the district scored proficient in math.

That’s right … not a single student.

On the other hand, Pope is spending thousands of taxpayer dollars staying at places like “Kingston Plantation Condos” and “Crowne Plaza Resorts.”

In fact, her travel budget alone could have purchased 2,820 gallons of bus fuel for the district this year.

Aside from the fact that South Carolina shouldn’t even be in the school bus business (we’re the only state in the nation to run its own bus fleet), how on earth are expenses like Pope’s justifiable in any district – let alone one that is failing its children at such a steady clip?

That’s the problem – and until school districts open up their checkbooks to public inspection (as Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom and others have proposed), don’t expect to see a solution any time soon.

In fact, a proposal to require school districts to document their expenses (and publish them online) was blocked earlier this year by State Sen. Larry Martin, a Republican.

Given our state’s worst-in-the-nation graduation rate, growing achievement gap and declining SAT scores (all despite massive funding increases), the bottom line is that South Carolina’s education establishment has forfeited any right to complain about money.

They’ve gotten plenty of it, they’re just wasting it.

Yesterday, for example, The Voice revealed that in August of 2008 alone, Superintendent Jim Rex’s Department of Education spent $323,797 on “non-state employee travel,” money that could have purchased 57,805 gallons of fuel for school buses or paid the salaries of five new teachers.

Remember that the next time you hear Rex complaining about losing $88.5 million from a budget that grew by a billion dollars in the previous four years.

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