Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010

GOP losing control of school board

Someone needs to explain things to the Republicans who make up the majority on the Johnston County Board of Education.

It was said, in the days of Ronald Reagan, that Republicans did not speak ill of one another. That’s how the party maintained the coalition needed to win elections. And yet in Johnston, the GOP-controlled school board has a politically destructive habit of picking public fights with County Commissioners, all of whom are Republican.

In a purely political ploy that has become all too predictable, the school board is trying to exploit money from commissioners by threatening to raise the fees that community groups, including churches, pay to use school buildings, mostly gyms and cafeterias with stages.

We’re not arguing with the strategy. If we wanted to extract more dollars out of County Commissioners, we too would enlist the help of church-going folk. But why do that publicly? Why would a Republican school board apply political pressure publicly to a Republican board of county commissioners?

We can think of two possible answers. One, the school board’s elected leaders have ceded authority to the bureaucrats, whose thirst for money is unquenchable. Or two, the Republicans on the school board are Republicans in name only.

Either answer is plausible. In our experience, most elected boards, because their members have day jobs, give too much authority to the hired help. But it’s possible too that some Republicans on the Johnston school board registered as Republicans only to win election.

In Johnston County, the Republican Party became dominant in part because all of its candidates were on the same page. The school board, clearly, is on a different page. Perhaps the county’s GOP leadership needs to choose its candidates more wisely.