A few years ago, just as the Pine Bluff School District slipped beneath the surface of the water and had to be rescued by the state, one of the school board members who had been on duty throughout the district’s demise said the board had no one else to blame but itself for the failure.
It was quite a revelatory remark and put the onus squarely where it belonged.
Yes, there are factors that make Pine Bluff a tough place to govern and the school district perhaps an even more difficult entity to run. One of the problems is the ever-shrinking population and enrollment. Fewer people, fewer tax dollars. Fewer students, less money going to the district. Suddenly, after budgets are locked in and teachers are under contract, the financial sands shift. And it continues to happen today as the population continues to dwindle.
But a school board, like it or not, is where both the blame and the accolades fall because those elected officials are ultimately in charge of the district’s path.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Since the state took over the Pine Bluff district, there has been no school board as education officials oversaw the annexation of the Dollarway district into the Pine Bluff district as well as the wholesale renovation of the Pine Bluff district. In short, the job at hand was beyond the capacities of a board to manage.
That is about to change. Last week, the state Board of Education said Pine Bluff had made enough progress to allow the installation of a limited-authority board to take the reins. That is good news for the district. It means that for now, the district has, under the guidance of Superintendent Barbara Warren, avoided collapse. And to be given its board back means the district, at some point, is headed back to local control.
Education officials will now be taking applications and interviewing people to serve on the limited-authority board. Considering the failure of the last elected board, having people interview for the job seems all the more appropriate. We understand that’s not the way the world works, but having people who thoroughly understand what it takes to operate a school district sift through candidates for school board is more comforting, at least at this point, than picking between candidates A, B and C who up and decided they wanted to serve on the school board and who may know squat about what’s involved.
That’s where school patrons will have to get to work. In what we expect to be the not-too-distant future, the public will indeed be electing candidates for school board, and those people will once again be in charge of the district. Perhaps voters will be more discerning at that time than they were in the past.