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Cut some costs by reducing trustees

Sometimes we get a sense of deja vu from this school board.

Sometimes we get a sense of deja vu from this school board.

Last year, the board considered closing Silver Creek Elementary, causing considerable upset among the parents and students in that community. Trustees eventually voted to keep the school open – only to revisit that decision again this year.

This seems incredibly unfair to those who lived through last year’s process, only to have to endure it again.

But sometimes reconsidering a previous decision is a wise course of action. Such is the case with last year’s decision to maintain the same number of elected school board trustees.

Despite being one of the largest boards of elected trustees – including one trustee whose area of representation has just one school in the district – the board rejected a number of options to reorganize the electoral boundaries  and save money by cutting their numbers from nine to seven.

They could have done it in time to meet the last municipal election, but didn’t. It wouldn’t save a ton of cash, but reducing trustee numbers would have had some savings and also would have shown the public that trustees were also accepting some of the pain of cutbacks to the school district’s budget.

The board needs to move forward and reduce its numbers in time for the next election, before politics trumps fiscal common sense.