Opinion: Millbrook's School Board Needs to Stop Kicking the Budget Can Down the Road

MILLBROOK, June 3 — For the third consecutive year, the Millbrook Unified School District's board voted last Tuesday to delay adopting a finalized operating budget, citing "ongoing negotiations" and "unresolved state funding questions." And for the third consecutive year, I find myself sitting in this folding chair at a school board meeting, watching parents and teachers file out looking more frustrated than when they walked in. At some point, delay stops being a strategy and starts being a habit — and habits like this one have real victims.

What Keeps Getting Pushed Back

Here's what's actually at stake in the deferred line items:

• Replacement of crumbling roof sections at Dunmore Elementary and Westfield Middle School
• Two unfilled reading specialist positions that have been vacant since September
• A long-promised update to the district's outdated network infrastructure, some of which dates to 2009

These aren't pet projects or political wish lists. They are basic operational needs that the board's own facilities committee flagged as urgent eighteen months ago. The longer the board waits, the more expensive each fix becomes — and the more students fall through the cracks in the meantime.

A Simple Ask

I'm not here to tell the school board how to do their jobs. But I will say this: the community elected these seven individuals to make hard calls, not to convene subcommittees that produce reports that spawn more subcommittees. Superintendent Harold Baines has publicly stated that a finalized budget is achievable by mid-July. The board should hold him — and themselves — to that timeline. If they can't, voters will remember come November, and they should.