Board of Education Member Bill Mattingly made what was for him was a long speech at the last Board of Ed meeting. Here are some of the things he said:

AIt wasn=t broken overnight and we=re not gonna fix it overnight. The bottom line is that with the resources, you know we have constraints.@ and AThe action plan is fine, but there=s gotta be hard target completion dates for things to be done.@

Are the hard target completion dates just for Great Mills High School? What about targets for when the Board of Education will complete its share by providing the funding for the positions recommended by Great Mills High School Enhancement Group?

AThere=s gonna have to be progressive discipline and they=re either gonna have to walk the line or, unfortunately, we=re gonna have to eliminate some of those children and find other opportunities for them. A

Eliminate children? Are you going to get out your uzi and shoot them? What other opportunities do we have, Mr. Mattingly? If the Board can=t fund positions at Great Mills, how can you fund positions at the Alternative Learning Center? We have two choices. Spend $8,400 a year to educate them and succeed at it or spend $25 -$30,000 a year later to imprison them.

AAnd the parents have to understand this because the parents are the ones that, they have to take responsibility.@

So it=s the parent=s fault, right? But we=ll eliminate the children? Now that makes sense.

AY=all gotta make some tough decisions, especially you Dr. Lymas, because you have to discipline staff and scrub staff and get the right people there.@

What if the School System doesn=t hire the right people for Dr. Lymas to chose from? Is she supposed to just keep Ascrubbing?@

Let=s face it. Great Mills High School has 73 students that account for half of the referrals that clog its discipline system. Something has to be done about them. But despite those 73 children, let=s not get all excited about writing off Great Mills.

After all, it ranks 806 in the Newsweek Top 1,000 US High Schools list. That=s 806 out of 27,468 schools. It=s a great high school. It could use some help with that little group of students, and the School Enhancement Group has made a series of good recommendations. While Mattingly said the Board would support the school, he didn=t seem to think money should be part of the support.

So we come back to the old question. Who is responsible for this situation? Not the Board of Education. They have all the funding they need from the Bridge to Excellence Agreement with the County Commissioners. They decided not to approve a charter school application which might have provided a way to break the log jam of poor education for disadvantaged children. But they are not responsible. We know who is responsible.