During the January regular meeting of Fayette School Board of Education, Ms. Erin Robinson, Executive Director of Human Resources and Title IX Coordinator, presented the FY 2025 Personnel Allotments. In her “new approach,” she recommends that principals reduce allotments in a way that is fair and gives flexibility and that they are encouraged to maximize FTE (full-time employees) in the areas of EIP, ESOL, Remediation, and Gifted.

During the discussion, Dr. Patterson, our Superintendent, said there would be a system reduction of about forty positions, although I am hearing it now may be near seventy. We have known that the schools’ financial issues due to our limited local property tax base, but I thought we would make more of a fight to keep our schools great.

First, I am troubled that there has been zero public discussion on how we maintain what we have come to know as our “Fayette Advantage.” In the years during and after the financial recession, board members Janet Smola, Terri Smith, Marion Key, and Dr. Bob Todd, partnered with superintendents Dr. John Decotis and later Dr. Jeff Bearden to keep parapros in every one of our Kindergarten classrooms, and our class sizes less than state maximums.

There were scary moments where FCBOE came close to  running out of money, but the plan worked and while there may be more grey hairs, our students got the resources we planned. Now we have a reserve of over twenty million dollars.

Unfortunately, our current board and administration have no such drive to keep our schools fully resourced or recognize that our history of success was driven by these strategies more than any data collected. What is our new strategy?

Instead, we treat each school building as a separate “city state” that develops its own plan to deliver education as if it were different than the other FCBOE school down the road.

At the same time, emphasis is on making sure that each high school gets the exact same athletic allocation. One example would be the tennis courts that each high school is getting one regardless that two are a short distance from the “crown jewel” Tennis (and Pickleball) Center in Peachtree City.

To be clear, we cannot use the five million dollars in ESPLOST capital funds used for the tennis courts for teachers. However, we should ask, how do we make sure that each school, and more importantly each student gets the same access to resources?

In any school there are involved parents that wind up trying to drive things toward the best advantage of their student. However, as these parents speak for their children, a reasonable person may ask who speaks for the children whose parents are uninvolved for whatever reason?

Seems like a long time ago in a private conversation, one of our current school board members asked, “are we going to be a school system, or a system of schools?” But that is only one dynamic.

Listening to Ms. Robinson’s presentation, there was clearly a process to develop this plan. While the school board is supposed to represent the public, this seems like a case where the public should be included, not just anointed insiders, but regular folks.

Maybe nobody shows up as I see only 17 people at this meeting, but including the public may provide perspective and alternatives to reducing nearly seventy school-based positions.

Some will rightly point to the homestead exemption we voters approved in recent year’s that limits property tax growth to three percent while costs climb at a much faster rate. However, I would point to SB 349 which is likely to pass and then spread this limitation across the entire state.

Instead of wringing our hands about how much money we do not have locked in our tax base, it may be a better plan to set priorities for our schools and develop strategies how to pay for it.

[Neil Sullivan is a finance/accounting executive and CPA. He has lived in Peachtree City over 20 years with his wife Jennifer, a Fayette County History teacher and son Jackson, a sophomore at Erskine College. He has been active in public school related issues in Fayette County, leading three E-SPLOST initiatives as chairman of Fayette Citizens for Children. He has appeared previously on these pages in letters to the editor.]