A Tale of Wasted Money

I have returned from a hiatus after writing the blog for several years it got very frustrating that no changes have taken place. A friend however pointed out that change is a slow process and is not instantaneous. With that in mind I will press on into 2010!
Recently the paper reported on the “rezoning” committee of DPS who were looking at overcrowding at Johnson Elementary. Clueless Huckabee, the committee head (who in their right mind made that decision…..) decided the best course was to do nothing. Hmmmmm….and it took a year to figure this out?
In the article it states that they had no way of telling how many students would be affected by boundary changes or what grades they would be in. Oh really? Excuse me Mr Huckabee but IST has a program that does that! Jeez… The program along with the city GIS program tells you a total breakdown of students, racial, male/female, and grade level of each street in the city. By moving a boundary line one street or half a street the resulting changes will be displayed. I don’t know which is more frustrating, the fact they didn’t use the program, or the fact that Huckabee didn’t even know it existed.
The overpopulation could easily be corrected by adjusting zones to Woodberry and Woodrow, both underutilized schools. This isn’t brain surgery.
While we are at it why even keep Woodrow? It is landlocked, outdated, has no parking, lies in a congested zone, and is the least user friendly. Any board with any sense would have closed this albatross. What does our board do? It goes ahead and spends $300,000 on the school that has no business being open!
These are the kind of asinine decisions being made by the board. While other more viable school buildings are having maintenance deferred the least viable building is getting money thrown at it.
The taxpayers of Danville should hold the DPS and City Council (I hold them just as responsible since they control the purse strings) responsible for this total waste of money. I don’t care if they win a hundred fraudulent state awards ( more on that later) it is a poor business decision. If what they are doing is so great why hasn’t it been duplicated in every school in the district? Because it is all smoke and mirrors.
It’s time for citizens to step up and sweep this incompetent board and administration out of their chairs and get people in who have some common sense---- something missing from the current occupants.