Way To Go, Beaufort Educrats

Sometimes the morons running South Carolina’s worst-in-the-nation public school system really do manage to out-do themselves … and we’re not just talking about the remarkable PR job they’ve done to divert your attention from our state’s continually deteriorating academic position.

Nor are we referring to how they bitch and moan incessantly about private citizens making legal contributions to political campaigns … all while refusing to tell you how they’re spending your tax dollars.

Nope … sometimes they manage to do these things while simultaneously demonstrating a complete and total inability to perform the same mathematical skills they’re responsible for teaching our children.

Take our educrat friends in Beaufort County, S.C., for example, who last month became the poster bozos for government stonewalling when they brazenly ignored a Freedom of Information Act request for several months before finally demanding that a conservative think tank fork over $214,580 to produce the district’s expense records for the previous two years.

Never mind that these are records which should be publicly-available at no cost.

Well … it turns out that the district now wants a “mulligan” on the whole $214,580 amount.

In fact, from the district’s second letter to the S.C. Policy Council:

I am writing to let you know that I made a computational error in the letter I sent you that is dated on the 21st (of October) and it has been brought to my attention. I apologize.

Mmmm-hmmm.

So now, instead of $214,580, the district is now ready to make these public documents, um, publicly-available for the bargain basement price of … wait for it … (drum roll, please) … $55,388!

That’s right … something an administrative assistant (and believe us, these schools have plenty of those) should be able to throw together on a spreadsheet within fifteen minutes now no longer costs as much as four-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood … you can get it for the same price as a new 2008 Audi S5!

You can read the district’s letter below, but there’s no mention of what the “computational error” was or how it was made … nor is there any explanation as to why the district took four-and-a-half months to answer a Freedom of Information request it was legally required to answer within two weeks.

Obviously, they’re not too quick on the uptake down in Beaufort’s public school system … but again, the bigger point here is that every expense that’s made with taxpayer dollars ought to be available at any time for taxpayers to look at – as Comptroller Richard Eckstrom has repeatedly proposed.

Not only would that stop the stonewalling, but it would also likely prevent the sort of wasteful behavior that compels these educrats to stonewall in the first place.

In fact, while Beaufort educrats are busy trying to prevent the taxpayers from looking at their expenses, another S.C. school district is being called out for demanding $5,000 simply to produce his travel receipts for the past year.

From the Orangeburg Times & Democrat:

Bill Rogers, executive director of the South Carolina Press Association, said the $5,000 price tag to view travel receipts for a single year is outrageous. The amount would be a “little high” even to locate a decade’s worth of correspondence and receipts.

Clearly, without an online disclosure system in place, these knuckleheads are going to continue to find ways to hide how they’re spending our money …

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