My thoughts on the Fayette County School Board Q&A

Last night I went to a Q&A session with a couple of members of the school board for parents and members of the community. (I'm both.) Very nice event. Very glad I went out, and it was very encouraging to see the good turnout in the room. Steve Brown did a fine job of moderating, offering up questions gathered from parents via Facebook, and live audience had a number of questions as well.

I have a few reactions to their questions.

1) Chromebooks and student privacy and security.

They say that they have good firewalls and IT staff, and that they teach careful internet practices in high school. I still don't feel greatly reassured. I know how much of a data leak the Chrome web browser is. It's recently been reported that in spite of laws and user agreements, Google apparently still collects data on child users from school programs. I prefer to use an alternative browser on my own computers, along with a tracker-blocking extension from EFF. I understand that they are getting this hardware from Google, they are trusting Google too much.

I asked my questions, they answered.

2) The acquisition of the land where they want to build the "new" Booth. 

One question was, why did the school system own unused land in the first place. They answered that the school board had rushed to buy this land some years ago to prevent another buyer from driving the price up. And they said that the only alternative to this strategy of speculative purchase would be eminent domain whenever they needed to build.

Now, I'm no fan of eminent domain. But at the same time, I don't accept the idea that it's either-or. It sounded like someone else was interested in that property before the school system claimed it. Someone with ideas and plans. But those plans will never be realized, at least not in that location. And no, it's not guaranteed that this new school will be of more value to the community than the plans that were prevented. Remember the example of the elementary school that was built for $10 million and sold just a few years later for half the price.

It's one thing when a private individual or business engages in land or money speculation with their own money. They bear the price of failure. But when elected officials do speculation, they are doing it with tax money. Our money. That's a different situation.

3) Budget. 

Mr. Hollowell said, "We're the only local entity where the state can say, give us X amount of dollars." Mr. Hollowell, I know the feeling. It's called taxation. You guys come to us every year, through the middle man of the tax commissioner, and require us to pay an amount of your choosing. Not fun, is it?

Here's the video from the event.