Opinion: Try a portable solution

Pinellas County School Board members, those masters of timing, are talking about spending $100,000 to $200,000 to build themselves seven private offices at the administration building in Largo. Now, each board member has a partitioned desk in a large meeting room. This comes at a time when the school system has so little money that it is considering dropping summer school and pressing substitute teachers into full-time duty.

These are the same board members who, when faced with a $24-million shortfall in state funding, approved a $60,000 increase in Superintendent Howard Hinesley's salary and benefits. They apparently never learned the Marie Antoinette lesson: It's not a good idea to be openly extravagant when everyone else is suffering.

Board members say they need their own offices to conduct private conversations, presumably with constituents and not each other. But that scenario doesn't really fit the job description. The School Board is a part-time position, in which members make policy decisions and then let the education professionals run the schools. While a board member might need space for a private conversation now and then, that could be accomplished with a single office that they share. There is probably one of those available at no extra cost.

The board members didn't even put the offices in their budget for this year. That means they would have to use money that was meant for some other purpose. A more responsible approach would have been for board members to first justify the need for office space and then to budget for it, preferably in more abundant times.

But there is a solution, one that hard-pressed teachers and long-suffering parents might approve. The board could move a portable classroom to the administration building parking lot and make that into an office. It's what they recommend when a school needs more space.

Yes, the board members would have to soil their loafers walking to the main building from the office, and it might have a musty smell and peeling paint, but they should look on the bright side. It would give them insight into what they impose on students and teachers when they ask them to do with less.

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